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DISCOURSES BY E. P. POWELL 

Author of "Our Heredity from God" 




CHICAGO 
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY 

175 Deakbobn Btreet, 

1889 




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Copyright, 1889, 
By Charles H. Kerr & Co. 



PREFACE. 



Evolution has brought us to face such new views 
of life, and of our responsibility as the finality of the 
animal kingdom, and inheritors of an eternal evolution 
of organic and functional power, that we must recast 
our views of sin altogether. Henceforth, if I do not 
mistake the drift, sin will be held to be not a per- 
sonal affront to a Creator,- but a course of action that 
degrades ourselves in either body or mind, and that tends 
to degeneration. We are placed in charge of ourselves 
by the fact of self-consciousness; and the sum of all 
duty is so to use ourselves as to be in every function 
honest, wholesome and regenerative. 

Liberty is not a power to act as we choose, but 
to live in fullest accord with Him " in whom we live 
and move and have our being." This book is offered 
cordially to those who desire only that liberty which 
broadens and intensifies existence. It is in some sense 
supplementary to my book " Our Heredity from God;" 
and I am confident that readers of that volume will not 
misunderstand me. 

E. P. P. 



CONTENTS. 



Life and Death; What They Are f 7 
Sin a Crime Against Life: Righteousness Obedience 

to Law - 15 

Sinning Against the Holy Spirit ----- 27 

A Sound Mind in a Sound Body ----- 39 

Is the Average Life Worth the Living? 49 

The True, the Beautiful and the Good - - - 55 

Not Allopathy nor Homeopathy, but Sympathy - 63 

The True Life- - 80 

The Doing Creed 89 

The Keys - 97 

A Bundle of Paradoxes 109 

A Substitute for Orthodoxy - 121 

The Two Theologies - - - - ----- 135 

Natural Moral Compensation ----- 144 

Character r 154 

The Religion of the Future ----- 173 
New Year in 1982 - - - - - • - -187 



LIBERTY AND LIFE. 



LIFE AND DEATH— WHAT THEY AEE. 

If you will open any Biology or other work that 
involves a scientific definition of life, you will invariably 
find that not anything can be said to live which 
does not have the power to die. In fact, it lives only 
as it dies. Death is a faculty or attribute of life. Not 
anything has an honorable self-existence that lacks the 
power to decay. A definition of life is: (1) The 
power to take up matter and assimilate it and thus 
grow, or sustain growth. (2) The power of steadily 
wasting matter after it is used. Partial or steady 
death is an absolute qualification to living. So the loss 
of substance is made up by assimilation, and assimila- 
tion is as constantly balanced by destruction. Life, 
then, is the wise balance between growth and decay. 
If you could not decay, you would cease to live as 
promptly as if you could not assimilate. All dead 
things, like crystals, differ from you in this, they grow, 
but they cannot die ; they, therefore, cannot live. A 
grain of salt may become a drop of saline water, and 
then a grain again ; it has not lived or died in the 
changes. You eat, and what you eat you transform 
into blood, then into tissue ; at the same time you burn 
up in your body a large amount of material to secure 
heat and perform motion. This is dying. Every step 
you take is at the expense of a fraction of life. Every 
song you sing is by the waste of a part of your existence. 
You write, you speak, you feel, you pray, at the cost of 
life. To live is to die. To live grandly is to die rap- 
idly. To be a power is to be quick at decay. To live 



LIBERTY AND LIFE. 



well is to die harmoniously. To live grandly is to per- 
ish grandly. The orator who thrills you does it with 
his life. The more perfect the life the more rapid the 
death. Conversely that life only can be complete that 
works accurately and dies rapidly. So a man may be 
alive, and yet not alive as his neighbor is — alive to 
some things only and dead to others. You probably 
have not yet come to life in relation to more than a 
fraction of the universe about you. Not being able to 
assimilate a thought, you cannot use that thought, and 
are not yet alive to it. You cannot eat a certain food 
because you canno* get rid of it. You cannot destroy 
it and, therefore, cannot make it contribute to life. 
Organizations may be supposed vastly more alive than 
any existing human being — but more alive only as they 
are able more grandly to carry on the process of dying. 
It was his ability to die that made Emerson superior to 
his cloddish neighbor. The brute man dies as a brute 
dies, and he, therefore, lives only as a brute lives. A 
big truth, a scrap of the poetry of nature clogs him. 
Taken into his eye or ear, they cannot be made to die 
into a clear joy or a more harmonious course of action. 
He cannot, therefore, broaden his life with them. The 
intellectual man dies in brain action ; but he thereby 
has brain life and power. The last thing a man should 
seek to escape from is death. He has no other attri- 
bute equal to it. That which one should dread is to stop 
dying. You may fairly say that the true object of ambi- 
tion is to reach, not a deathless state, but one in 
which living is broader because dying is more harmo- 
nious . 

Carry the thought into morals. Jesus applied it in 
a paradox. He that dies to himself lives in others. He 
that would save his soul must give his soul. Or, he 
that would save his life shall lose it ; but he that would 
give his life shall save it. Here the equilibrium between 
dying and living is carried over into morals. You are 



LIFE AND DEATH WHAT THE! ARE. 9 

alive in the higher sense of joy in generous work just 
in proportion as you give yourself to others. Howard 
lived ; Miss Nightingale lived ; Wilberforce lived ; 
John Brown lived, in a sense that they could not have 
lived in selfishness. Can you compare the life of Gar- 
rison as it was with the life of Garrison if he had never 
lifted his hand for the slave ? Can you conceive what 
Jesus would have been had he lived driving nails like 
his father and holding the creed of his mother ? A 
narrow believer and a builder of houses ; one of a mil- 
lion more like him. But his life he lifted out of this, 
and by giving himself to truth and to the poor, he lived 
so greatly, so richly, so deeply, that some have called 
it a God's life. 

The emotional man lives in praying and singing, 
which is only a way of wasting his energy. What he 
calls the joy of religion is his way of dying. When 
highly charged with vitality he prays with terrible ener- 
gy, and while fancying he is pulling down God to his 
will, he is simply dying. He loses a part of his 
strength . It is no wonder if at times, in the ecstasy 
of his effort, he loses the equilibrium of existence and 
dies altogether. Nor is it surprising, when understood, 
that the final throes of life in a person deeply religious, 
who has made it his prime business to die daily in 
prayer and praise, it is no wonder that his final throes 
shall lose their agony in a shout of glory, and his death 
scene be very much like one of his prayer meetings. 
All that you can make out of a death-bed victory, the 
glorious death of a saint, when the heavens open and he 
cries victory, is that his dying is all concentrated in one 
direction, on one idea, and that idea is intensely alive, 
it blazes up into a glow of brief magnificence. On the 
other hand, the drunkard concentrates all his dying in 
the last hour on the one gross indulgence of the flesh, 
and his last flash of life is accords thereto ; the nerves 
burn, the stomach is on fire, the brain blazes, the senses 



10 LIBERTY AXP LIFE. 

live for one last scene ; he sees demons, horrors, and 
in the balance between living and dying is at once and 
forever destroyed in an act of indescribable agony. It 
is possible for one to die on a cross with a shout of joy ; 
it is not possible for the life that is sensual to end its 
dying in any scene of victory. 

A great joy is only a very rhythmical and happy pro- 
cess of dying ; and a very great joy sometimes closes 
up dying and living at once — it is too rapid death. 

Nearly all disease, instead of being a difficulty with 
living, is a difficulty in the way of dying. The food 
that disturbs digestion, poisons the blood, clogs 
thought and enfeebles both body and brain, is food 
that the stomach cannot get rid of, cannot use and send 
to waste. It is simply so much extraneous matter fill- 
ing up the passages of the body and clogging the vital 
machinery. A severe cold is simply the closing of the 
passages through which the dying material is ejected. 
Dyspepsia is the failure of the stomach to prepare for 
assimilation the material gathered in it. 

Now note that life must be looked on as the suste- 
nance not only of an individual existence, but very 
subtly involved in this individual is the past. It is a 
life that repeats and sustains the life of old individuals. 
The father physically is repeated in his son, and all 
the past is a flow of life which has flowed through 
thousands of organisms, and never has ceased to be 
life. All the generations of humanity are linked with- 
out a break from first to last of so much as one minute. 
Each body grows out of another body, as a bud grows 
out of a tree. The. functions of Adam are the functions 
that still operate in you. So you see life is something 
bigger than the existence of individuals; it is a vast 
unbroken unity, of which we appear as representatives. 
In this continued life, which itself flows from previous 
and eternal life, there is present not merely a repetition 
of one life-form, but in the tide is a propulsion of a 



LIFE AND DEATH WHAT THEY ARE. 1 1 

sort that we call evolution. Life appears steadily in 
higher forms; the life of to day is a larger, more com- 
plex affair than it was a million years ago. 

So also involved in life is all the future. Very subtly 
there is to-day in us a tendency not merely to assimilate, 
to waste, to reproduce, to act, but there is an uncon- 
scious tendency to higher physical, mental and 
moral forms and contents of life. Nor is this wholly 
unconscious. We contain in us the potency of Para- 
dise, and a will to make it. There is no conceivable, 
no expressible height of existence, no glory of life that 
it will take millions of years to reach, but the potency 
of that life is in us to-day. The nineteenth century 
after Jesus was germinally in the nineteeth century 
before the huge Saurians dragged their slimy folds 
through the hot seas of antiquity. So the nineteenth 
century after Darwin is germinally in you and me. 
Here life appears in a light that must be considered by 
us before we cry out for perpetuity of our individual 
selfhood. 

We can now easily take one more step in considering 
this subject. We have seen that life is one flow, one 
tide, one fact reaching through vast ages of time with 
a unity of act and unity of purpose. We have seen 
how utterly unlike the living is to the lifeless — the thing 
that assimilates and dies to that which is made up by 
mechanical force and ended in the same way. But on 
this globe life had a beginning. How did it originate ? 
Is it a phenomenon of the lifeless ? Did it spring 
from that which does not live ? We have not the least 
evidence of that sort. It is more rational to suppose 
life to have sprung from life. Science avers it could 
have originated in no other way. Then we are faced 
by this magnificent suggestion: is all life as it is and 
has been and will be on this globe, or anywhere else, 
is it only the expression, or, as we may say, the 
heart-throb of life that is eternal ? Is there really no 



12 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

such thing as death? Is the universe alive? Is what 
we call death only change ; only forms of progress? 
And is that life, that eternal change, that embraces us, 
and embraces all life, is it the only God? 

How, then, shall we define life? It is the one single 
and only fact of the universe, and it flows out in infinite 
ways. It is The Life in us. In God we live. 

What, then, is that process or event in our career 
that we have been accustomed to call death ? It is but 
a process of the eternal life, the God in whom we live 
and have our being. Does it bring our conscious exist- 
ence to an end ? Are we plunged back into the uncon- 
scious life of the universe and lost to ourselves? — of 
course not lost to the universe. 

It becomes, then, a living question how to carry on 
our daily dying wisely ; in what way to waste ourselves 
for the most real profit for ourselves and others ; for 
we shall live grandly only as we die grandly. 

Everett, in his address at the funeral of Longfellow, 
said : "His age was as beautiful as his manhood and 
youth. ' Morituri Salutamus,' that marvelous poem, is 
perhaps the grandest hymn to age that was ever writ- 
ten. It is no distant dream, as it was when those 
sounding Spanish lines fell from his pen. He feels its 
shadows. He feels that the end is drawing near. But 
there he stands strong and calm, with sublime faith, as 
at the first. He gathers from the coming of age, from 
approaching night, not a signal for rest, but a new 
summons to activity. He cries : 

1 Is it too late ? No, nothing is too late, 
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate' — " 

And so he takes up his glad work again, and I think 
more of his sweetest and deepest songs date from his 
latest period. His was a calm, loving age, full of 
activity, confidence and peace. 

The child cries as soon as he is born. Man never 
gets beyond the instinct. In hours of anxiety 



LIFE AND BEATH WHAT THEY ARE. 13 

or in his higher moods he yearns with longing toward 
what he calls his Father. Now, laying aside all 
the influence of superstition and the craven influence 
of terror, there is still something here to account for. 
I cannot see that it is less than an instinctive feeling of 
life for life. Where it came from is perhaps not so 
easily answered. The primitive man evidently had it 
in strength. It is none the less the strongest propen- 
sity of the highest culture. Cetawayo and Emerson 
are equally subject to the innate tendency. It is a 
coarse or a refined passion according to the make-up 
of the man, yet it is never lacking. The tide of life 
that has evolved man is never quite lost to its source. 
Father and child are one ; they instinctively love. The 
Universal Fatherhood is felt in the sonship everywhere, 
and there is a mutual seeking and loving. This 
explains the universality of prayer. Under the gross 
beggary of prayer there lies a deep instinct for God. 

Nor must we overlook that so far as instinct of this 
sort is concerned, early man was nearer the causative 
life than we are. What we determine by higher pro- 
cesses of reason he felt 

Not one religion worthy of recognition has existed 
that has not worked oat the problem of life on the side 
of hope as ending in a state of painlessness and peace. 
Now we know that such a state is not in any way like 
the active conditions of this life, because in nothing is 
struggling more fertile than pain. All doing involves 
undoing ; all moving involves disturbance ; all activity 
involves change, so that no good thing in this life can 
be or ever is permanent. The babe grows up, but by 
growing grows up out of your arms, and out of your 
house ; and you grow apart. The final demand of life 
is that you shall die. You die to give others life. It 
is altogether a process of feeding on each other. 

On the other hand a state of painlessness can only be 
possible in a state of inactivity, or in a state of uncon- 



14 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

sciousness ; where you have either become absolutely ' 
dead, or your living is absorbed into the unconscious 
universe. Hence the hope of orthodox religion is not 
eternal personal activity, which necessarily involves con- 
tinual death and change. 

Happiness, then, must be sought either in one of two 
things, the activities of living which are also the activ- 
ities of dying ; that is, one must find his joy in change, 
not in permanence, in dying, not in stability ; or he 
must seek it in escape from change, which is no more 
nor less than escape from all living. 

Is there not in nature a subtle principle that who- 
ever in any way seeks selfish ends makes a total blun- 
der, — that self can never be happy except in its relations 
and all relations to all others. No being can alienate 
himself in his seekings in the slightest degree from 
any other and so attain happiness. For a single soul's 
happiness to be an accomplished fact while one other 
soul is miserable would be impossible. So Asoka, the 
Buddhist, saw and said : "I will not accept Paradise 
while one remains in misery." Any attempt to be sel- 
fishly happy is at once punished by the misery always 
involved in selfishness. Life must go on together — 
whatever salvation there may be from the miseries of 
existence cannot be attained by trying to escape from 
the crowd and be saved individually. It is a law in 
every direction. Vanderbilt cannot shut himself in to 
enjoy wealth. Calvin cannot be shut up in Heaven 
while Servetus is out, for the self-seeking of Calvin 
gnaws at his heart strings if he be honest ; and if he 
be dishonest he is a liar even when he says he is happy. 
There is no breaking up of the family, the Life family. Out 
of unconsciousness we came into existence, we must work 
out the problem of existence, together, — Tim, the Tinker 
and Croesus ; Jack Cade and Bacon ; Satan and God. 

But if in this phase of life we cannot attain the goal 
of peace, and if in another the goal of painless rest can 



LIFE AND 'DEATH WHAT THEY ARE. 15 

only be the cessation of liviDg altogether, what hope 
have we? 

This, to cease struggling for individual salvation 
from the troubles of the life processes ; to become con- 
tent that the God Will shall be our will, to make the 
Universal Cosmic Purpose our purpose; conform our 
desire to the desire involved in Nature. What then ? 
You have ceased your petty strugglings for selfish ends, 
which involve the misery of so many others and never 
avoid misery for yourself. 

Now, ordinary religion is a struggle to escape, to get 
away from the troubles of existence. Eeason requires 
us to give up the desire to escape ; on the contrary, to 
become reconciled to Life, and whatever life is; that is 
death; and the processes of life, which are pain and 
change. 

Is there then no end, ho escape from the dying but 
in escape from the living? None whatever, for living 
and dying are one. Is then living an eternal process? 



SIN— A CEIME AGAINST LIFE— BIGHTEOUS- 
NESS OBEDIENCE TO LAW. 

Life is one attribute of the universe. The universe 
could not exist without it. An organized being is life 
organized. When matter is furnished the right condi- 
tions it is a manifestation of life. Man is the most 
perfect organization of eternal life that we know. So you 
must not think of a great, vast dead universe in which 
there is a God either somewhere or everywhere. But 
the universe is life and the sum of that life is good; 
it is universal eternal goodness. Life is good; death 
is evil. Moral life is life for living purposes; life 
aiming to antagonize the deathly. A man is moral 
who helps on the processes of life ; he that by his 
words or deeds, his trade or pleasures kills, is evil. 



16 LIBERTY AND LIFE.. 

Jesus came, as he expressly said, that we might have 
life. He gave his life that others might have life. 
For this is a law of life, that he loses it who hoards 
it. Life can be had only by living it. It is essen- 
tially activity. 

To talk about the origin of life is absurd. Noth- 
ing could have existed before life. It is only the 
manifestation of life that begins. There is life in an 
egg when you break it and cook its contents. That 
life is not yet manifested as a chicken. But when 
you eat it, it at once becomes a part of your life; a 
very different thing from what it would have been had 
it been brooded by the hen. Or if you break it and 
feed it to the hen it goes back to become an integral 
part of the life from which it first came. There is 
life in the grass; it is not grass life, but life, and 
when the cow eats it, it goes to make up another 
appearance of life. The cow is eaten by man; and 
that life which under certain conditions became stable 
in the grass, then in the cow, now lives in man's 
organism, flashes out in brain power; and, at last, life 
looks out at life, and thinks of itself. 

Life is beautiful, life is grand. To make the condi- 
tions such that life can manifest itself is right. To 
make two blades of grass grow where only one grew 
before is benevolence. To turn a fertile land into a 
desert is a sin. To render a fertile farm unfertile is 
evil. Sin and rightness begin not in our dealings with 
men, but with the humblest form of life. It is a crime 
to torture a worm ; it is a crime to destroy any form of 
life except as by doing so we advance some higher life. 
A man who ruthlessly switches off the roses that nature 
swings on a stalk, or with which she covers a rock, is 
sinning. Life is sacred, for the sum of life is God. 
God is sacred because he is the sum of life. As a 
mere potentate, no being is sacred. Life is holy. It 
is the I Am, the Being of the Universe, 



SIN — A CRIME AGAINST LIFE 17 

To partake of that life is our highest privilege. To 
partake of it largely is our glory. To be able to impart 
it to others is to be a child of life; that is a child of 
God. " In Him we live and move and have our being." 
In some people we live nobly and honorably. By them 
we are made more vital. Jesus was a son of God because 
He could give life to other men. 

Healing is one form of giving life; that is making 
others stronger and healthier for being near us. There 
are some so organized, so full of the divine life that 
they give to all about them. I do not mean the patent 
healers, who peddle life professionally. The real heal- 
ers are your sweetest friends in home life or friendship. 

A higher form of life-giving is the inspiration given 
you by life principles to hate the deadly, and love the 
lovely. Jesus gave life by His words as well as His 
presence. 

Before going on I want you to see this clearly, that 
organized beings cannot originate life. The organized 
forms of life, springing out of the vast inorganic uni- 
verse, get from the parent both substance and life. We 
always say that a man gets every particle of his body 
from nature; so he gets his life. This explains why 
the unconscious part of nature acts with such intelli- 
gence. Oar individual life is the relation of parts of 
universal life. We are but one thrill of that Infinite 
Being that is, and must be. 

Now comes the great moral question. Man having 
power over his own life, and over its capacity, sins who 
fails to make his living such that it shall not fall short 
of high and noble ends. A human life that is only a 
continual degradation of force to brutal ends reverses 
the object of nature. For the eternal life having at 
last evolved man requires of him to be a moral and 
intellectual force looking upward and onward. But so 
interlinked is moral and physical life that a man who 
disregards the laws of physical health and vital func- 



LIBERTY AND LIFE. 



tions cannot be a moral man. He comes short of the 
power he should exercise. Nor can a diseased organ- 
ism see the truth, or have healthy sentiments. 

Carefully make this distinction that the natural 
decomposition of every day life is not waste ; but only 
a process for letting loose power. You decompose your 
structure to give power to recompose ; you die in think- 
ing, but your thinking gives you power to think harder. 
Your highest moral law is, you must give your life to 
get it; that is by doing generously for others, you get 
your capacity to enjoy yourself, and he that would save 
his life loses it. This is the highest reach of life law. 
But he that wastes his life on rioting, or grossness, or 
idling, or appetite, does not gain power. It is total 
loss, the man is not dying that he may live more widely ; 
but he is dying out 

The true definition of life is a power to gather the 
material of the universe to ourselves, make it our own 
and use it under the control of a will. This constant 
accretion involves constant waste. Living involves 
dying. But right life is such a use of material that we 
do not die in such a way as to destroy our organic 
power and selfhood. Sin is self-destruction. To save 
yourself is the charge of Jesus. He gave it as His 
mibsion to help us to save ourselves. Our souls are not 
no things, mere expressions, thoughts, conceptions, 
but they are our organic selves, the subtler something, 
that is the result of life. The soul lives. To save the 
soul is to save the soul in all its functions from dying. 

Does this seem a trifle abstract? Well, nature always 
gives us chestnuts inside of burrs and shells. The life 
of the chestnut is even hidden when you get at the 
meat, it is in a little cell in the heart of the nut. Now 
I have got down at least to the nut, and we will see 
about the life germ that is in it. 

Walk down Genesee street with me and let us look 
at life as we shall see it. There is a feeble man, met 



SIN — A CRIME AGAINST LIFE. 19 

as soon as we start; he is hardly able to get along with 
a staff. You tell me it would be a sin to kill that man, 
and a sin for him to kill himself. How did he become 
feeble ? You answer by overwork at his trade. That 
is, he began to destroy his life by overwork and not 
obeying the laws of life. He stopped short of absolute 
disintegration. 

We next meet a tramp; blear-eyed, beastly, brain 
and body foul, with no sensations left but purely ani- 
mal. He is primarily the victim of lust. He has devi- 
talized himself. Statistics tell us that it is not so hard 
to save criminals as it is the licentious; because life is 
exhausted in the poor victim. The criminal is full of 
life, and you have your task to turn that living to the 
objects of helping his neighbors, rather than destroy- 
ing. The tramp is in the main Death on foot. Death 
traveling and spreading death. 

It will not be difficult for us in our walk to find tli9 
home of an idiot, for in this city of intelligence there is 
quite a group of these sad creatures. What is an idiot? 
A case of starvation of the brain. Idiocy is defined by 
the best authorities to be a case of arrested development 
of the brain and of the nerves that wait on the brain, gen- 
erally arising from lack of nutrition before birth. 
Therefore the children of licentious paupers are com- 
monly lacking in intellect. Their parents lack life to 
breed a brain; and what they do not naturally lack 
they waste. I knew a woman, one of the dozen ablest 
intellectually I ever met, whose children were idiotic 
for the most part, as well as deformed. It was a case 
of starvation before birth, owing to the brutal and lazy 
husband. 

Passing from the home of the idiots, we will visit 
some of the homes of chronic poverty. What is the 
matter with these families ? Give to them as much as 
you will, they are always poor. The larger part of 
paupers are hereditary paupers. You may not believe 



20 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

this, but statistics prove it. I do not refer to cases of 
children, or widows left with large families, or to cases 
of severe and protracted illness, but, these included, 
the majority of paupers are a class of devitalized human 
beings who do not inherit life enough to do more 
than beg. Indolence is of the same sort, a lack of vital- 
ity. And it is nothing but partial death: a case where 
waste is larger than repair, and fortunately the vitality 
is in a few generations entirely exhausted. Society 
does nothing more than to encourage pauperism by 
charity. The remedy must lie entirely in removing the 
causes that devitalize. The pauperism which is not 
hereditary is largely manufactured by false charity. 

We will turn now to a case of drunkenness. Intem- 
perance has its basis unquestionably in other evils. It 
is preposterous to suppose that so many would delib- 
erately face the chances of misery and abasement. 
Indeed, we know that in most cases intoxicants are used 
as stimulants. By reckless waste of vitality the person 
feels exhausted. His vital forces are run down. He 
uses liquors or drugs to whip them up. This works 
for a very short time, but ends in a deeper devitaliza- 
tion; and finally in a collapse. Then you have the 
drunkard, the spectacle that society sneers at, but that 
society constantly manufactures. Then our reformers 
try to induce the poor fellows to give up their drink. 
It is of no use if they do, unless you, in some way, 
give them back a measure of working vitality. Licen- 
tiousness has in most cases preceded, not followed, the 
use of stimulants. Of all the study of this studious 
age, not one per cent is based on physiological law. 
It proceeds wholly on a system of excessive waste. 
Nature evolved out of a brute age an intellectual age; 
but men are unable to comprehend the method of adjust- 
ing life to high and intense thought. The result is 
broken down scholars in every direction, dyspeptics and 
enfeebled, as well as morally disabled victims of devi- 



SIX A CRIME AGAINST LIFE. 21 

talizing study. Hence, our students largely try to 
rely upon stimulants — they endeavor to compensate for 
exhaustion with drugs and tobacco. A noted clergy- 
man said to me, " I could not do my work without 
cigars." All which is right if the cigar gives vitality 
instead of simply stimulating waste. 

If you prolong your visit to the asylum for the in- 
sane, you find that Dr. Gray gives you as causes for by 
far the larger part of insanity what may be summed up 
as exhaustion of vitality. The primal cause may lie 
back several generations ; it may have shown its effects 
in very different ways for one or two generations; but 
at last the brain fails. With all the good qualities of 
our Puritan fathers, their chronic devotion to a theol- 
ogy of hate and terror did not lead to a vigorous vital- 
ity. They believed the body to be accursed, and needed 
that one all-important truth which declares the body to 
be the temple of the Holy Ghost of manhood ; and shall 
we wonder that the New England states whilst most 
moral in regard to crime, are most stained with licen- 
tiousness, the cause of a lack of vitality. As a conse- 
quence nowhere is the proportion of divorces so great 
as in Connecticut and Maine. The race would have been 
obliterated by its false theories of life, had not a more 
robust and less Calvinistic stock come to save it. 

Now add that the children of these New Eng- 
landers, inheriting their intense thrift and drive, 
inherit also their overworked and exhausted nerves. 
The consequence is among other ills a tendency to 
insanity. 

The duty of the American people is more play, not 
more prayer; or rather to comprehend that he who 
gets an answer to prayer by play is better than he 
who gets no answer by prayer. If by play you get 
health and sweetness and moral purpose, and by prayer 
you get only remorse and regret, and are still a mor- 
bid dyspeptic, you had better play than pray. 



22 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

But we cannot stop our visits yet, for I want you 
to see that not only are idiocy, intemperance, licentious- 
ness, pauperism, insanity simply phases of exhausted 
life; but all the diseases which infest the intellectual 
life are of the same sort; that lust, passion, anger, intem- 
perance destroy the memory. The judgment loses its 
capacity under the influence of a depleted system. 
Mental vision becomes blurred. What right view of 
life or any interest that concerns us, can a vicious 
person have? The tramp travels over a dozen states, 
but he sees only debauchery and vulgarity. Should 
his eyes ever begin to see the purity that dwells in 
one morning sunrise, he would perforce cease his vaga- 
bondage. On the contrary, as life moves on, the 
moral will grows weaker to control passion, and the 
wretch sees absolutely nothing but the foul. White 
to him is black. His universe is nominally yours, but 
literally it is another thing. Hell is heaven; heaven is 
hell. It all depends on the power of the man to see. 

An old man of great wealth called on me while I was 
living in the west. He was a church member, and an 
officer in such an organization. His brain was giving 
way, and his only idea left was licentious indulgence. 
His language was covertly gross. That power with 
which he had killed his brain life survived, because his 
frame was still strong. He was like a skeleton that re- 
tained power to swing a hammer or a sword. So old age 
often strips away the religion and morals that were only 
covers to a corrupt soul, and leaves the old man for 
years to exemplify his controlling sin. Why does he die 
in this way? Simply for this reason; he has become 
a mere automaton, saying and doing without will, desire, 
or pleasure what he taught himself to say, to do, or at 
least, to think when his will was stronger. He is essen- 
tially dead; it is an automaton that lives. 

Can we not go a step farther and say truthfully that 
bigotry and superstition and other religious diseases are 



SIN — A CRIME AGAINST LIFE. 23 

equally the result of a low vitality. I know it is cus- 
tomary to speak of savages as full of vitality and vigor. 
They are far from it ; even their physical life of the 
lowest sort, that of brute strength is, as a rule, vastly 
inferior to that of civilized people; they are invariably 
a waning stock. Everywhere savages that are not 
becoming civilized are dying out. They have only a 
semblance of life. Superstition is native to such a 
diseased condition ; equally is bigotry a natural quali- 
fication of a narrow civilized life. Men are the most 
religious in the months that are the least vivifying. 
Kevivals coincide with March , they rarely break out 
in June or mid-summer. There is no time when you 
cry out so piteously as when you have become reduced 
in strength. After sin then repentance, after passion 
then prayer. When you are vital, temperate, clean- 
blooded, then you are calm and fearless. "Women are 
not more religious than men, for any other reason than 
that they so live that they are as a rule lacking in 
self-reliance ; they must lean on something more vital 
than themselves. I wish it were obligatory on every 
woman to read in Philip Gilbert Hamerton's recent 
volume, entitled, " Human Intercourse," the chapter on 
" Priests and Women." 

What then is the criminality of intemperance ? Not 
that it breaks the law of God ; but what it breaks is a 
law of eternal life, because it devitalizes us. Is it any 
less a sin to bring ourselves to the same degree of 
feebleness by inertia, by laziness, by overwork, by 
breathing bad air? Certainly not. Whatever exhausts 
your vital power is sin. Lust is supremely sin only 
because it destroys life by the very process nature pro- 
vides to multiply life. 

Dying becomes a matter of heredity. Idiocy or 
brain death is inherited. Insanity, which is atrophy 
of life, is inherited. Weakness, which is lack of life 
in parts, is inherited. Moral imbecility and perversity, 



24 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

which is life facing toward death, is inherited. In this 
sense we inherit our father's sins. A mother gives her 
child half a life, instead of a life. 

Here, then, is the one important, all important les- 
son for us to learn, that sin is not disobeying a set of 
rules arbitrarily decreed by a God. It is not the 
refusal to be baptized or to believe a creed; it is that 
action or course of action that set3 us against life, that 
prevents us from living in the largest way, and from 
being most completely healthy in performing the func- 
tions of body and brain. A man sins who performs 
any function in a way to weaken himself. 

If sin is self-destruction and the destruction of 
other selves, it follows that righteousness is the salva- 
tion and increase of life. In the case of a sinner it is 
the restoration of life, and the great problem of the 
world is, how shall this be done? How shall the lower 
races be reinvigorated ? How shall the criminal and 
vagabond class be rescued? How shall the people in 
general be made more to partake of life? How shall 
you and I learn to live more widely, more strongly? 

I need only say that in answering this question the 
church has failed. It no longer makes an attempt to 
save us. It simply gives up the problem, announcing 
• that mankind is in this world unsavable, and that a 
small portion only shall have life given to them here- 
after. Plainly, life cannot be given to any man; life 
is universal, and the saved individual must be- taught 
to partake of it himself. There is no salvation in 
believing, except as that belief actually leads you to 
wiser ways. Recognizing what good has been done by 
religions, it is high time for us to see that they have 
not saved the world. Most of them have been unable 
to save themselves. 

We must see one more thing, that while evolution 
has unquestionably carried life marvelously forward 
from its first manifestation in an amoeba, or ascidian, 



SIN A CRIME AGAINST LIFE. 25 

yet the man is not created. It will take thousands or 
millions of years for nature to bring about the abso- 
lutely perfect form and method of life. It cannot be 
until there shall be a perfect thinker who shall grasp 
the great thought of life; a perfect wilier who shall 
purpose his life on the line of absolute right; in other 
words, until nature can produce in the individual a per- 
fect image or copy of the infinite life. 

I am sure you will see there never was a greater 
farce than that a person who wholly despises life and 
lives facing death every hour, who does all he can to 
disorganize and devitalize himself, should hope for im- 
mortality. Immortality is the evolution of life toward 
higher, stronger, fuller life. If it is attained at all, it 
is a leap of life into continuity, it is a tendency in us 
now toward a future evolution, an evolution of more 
life. You cannot perpetuate dying ; the wages of sin 
is death, the gift of godliness is eternal life. 

Meanwhile the measure of salvation is the measure 
of a person's obedience to life laws. Much will be 
accomplished when the corner of all education is phys- 
iology. Our tendency to exhaustion and intemperance 
is our heredity ; it is the Adam in us, the drift. Now 
we know that the only way to overcome heredity is by 
a change of environments. One thousand generations 
of Irishmen in Ireland make no change; three genera- 
tions in free America evolutionize their whole being. 
Education changes our environments from an intellect- 
ual standpoint, surrounds us with a different universe. 
The final salvation must be, therefore, the enlargement 
of our power to see, to comprehend and to govern our- 
selves. What we need is more life. 

Dugdale, in "The Jukes," says the first condition of 
moral and social regeneration is public health. The 
draining of lands, the sewerage of cities* the ventila- 
tion of houses, the amelioration of tenements, the 
cleansing of streets, the widening of thoroughfares, 



'26 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

the removal of cesspools, the purity of water supplies, 
the abundance of fresh air, are conditions for the health 
of the community that will make them more able, and 
for that reason, more willing to do their work without 
exhaustion. With this increment of vitality they will 
need less, and therefore consume less of inebriating 
stimulants. Public health will react against intemper- 
ance in all its forms, and this again will react in main- 
taining and perfecting public health. The two great 
factors in a well balanced life are a healthy body, prop- 
erly developed, and a sound, broad judgment, resulting 
in a well fashioned will. 

The all important catechism for salvation does not, 
therefore, concern God and another world, but Supreme 
Life and this world. Its questions are, what shall we 
wisely eat ? what and how shall we study ? what is evil 
heredity, and how is it to be counteracted? how shall I 
so live as to strengthen my vital functions ? Sleep, and 
of the right sort becomes a moral duty. Play becomes 
righteousness. Separation from devitalizing habits 
and persons becomes the road to holiness; industry, and 
not overwork, becomes a moral obligation. Indeed 
religion is shifted from the obligation to eat eggs and 
fish for forty days, from saying three or seven prayers 
a day, to living open to the influx of divine life, and in 
obedience to vitalizing law. The end of life is to cre- 
ate moral ability, based on intellectual ability, which 
is itself dependent on vital, physical power. 

I have in previous sermons shown you the crime of 
allowing persons of a vampire sort to devour your 
strength, especially the sin of permitting unguarded 
access to the children. I have no time to reopen the 
point; but there is no one phase of this subject of more 
importance than conservative human intercourse. Do 
not waste yourselves in empty obedience to custom; 
nor let others make demands on you beyond your very 
ready power to safely render. 



SIN A CRIME AGAINST LIFE. 27 

Meanwhile, the measure of the power of a person to 
recover morally is his vital power. If he has life 
enough you can help him reorganize his purposes. 
For life can be biased into different channels of living. 
Therefore the most hopeless part of community is 
that part that wastes life on passion; not those who 
use their vitality in criminal ways. The most hopeless 
part is composed of those who either by ignorance or 
passion antagonize nature in her plan to build us as 
sons of that supreme life that blazes in suns, that 
flashes in lightning, that plays in the myriad animals, 
but above all flames upward in the moral beauty of a 
soul that loves the right, that does the true, and grows 
by every act stronger and more indestructible. 

"Beloved, now are we the sons of God; but it doth 
not yet appear what we shall be." 



SINNING AGAINST THE HOLY SPIEIT. 

Every thing has an atmosphere as much as every 
world has. Human beings are surrounded in this way 
by a spiritual selfhood. Animals and plants are of the 
same sort. The atmosphere of a beech tree is delight- 
ful ; that of a upas tree dangerous. These atmospheres 
impinge on each other, so that they affect our whole 
beings; and in turn we affect the foliage about us. 
Plants will not grow for some people, because some 
people poison them by their presence. A swarm of 
bees will allow one man to handle them and caress 
them; another cannot go near the hive with impunity. 
The atmosphere of a plant is healing, often curing the 
nerves of severe pain. Other plants are deadly to the 
sick. I have a few such healing pets, but the same 
ones may be injurious to my wife. The higher the 
organism, the more sensitive to atmospheres. The 
lower the organism, the less sensitive. The gross can 



28 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

endure what would kill others. They thrive on it, feed 
on it and enjoy it. Inert, lifeless matter has no atmos- 
phere ; as the moon, which is a lifeless world, has no 
atmosphere. A sensitive plant is simply a plant that 
cannot endure the atmosphere of many people. What- 
ever goes to make up a living thing or creature, all of 
that goes to make up its atmosphere. If a plant begins 
to decay, its atmosphere has death in it ; and we cannot 
go near it with impunity. A man who is diseased is 
diseased in his atmosphere. Sensitive persons cannot 
nurse the sick without more or less of the sick person's 
symptoms. But, besides this, a constitutional disease 
like scrofula permeates not only the body but the at- 
mosphere,, sickening many who .approach. Atmos- 
pheres impinge of necessity as much as bodies; so that 
you may really be under a person's physical power be- 
fore he has laid his hand on you. This is true of some 
animals. The power of a snake to charm is not wholly 
in the eye. The old myth of trees, that each one had 
a soul, is not so wholly untrue. I cannot help feeling 
soothed and peaceful under beech trees. George 
Francis Train sits in New York Central Park, refusing 
to shake hands with any one because he believes it to 
be injurious to him physically. It is not an insane 
whim. The higher classes in China believe the same. 
Human approach fattens men like gross old Dr. John- 
son, who never would walk anywhere but in the 
crowded streets. Others must get away from human 
beings at least a part of the time. Health for myself 
is not possible if my time is largely spent among men 
— I must be with trees. Men break up my atmos- 
phere and encroach on me too harshly. A Berlin phy- 
sician has started a theory, that, being ourselves animals, 
we should wear only animal clothing. Some of us 
would thus be seriously injured. The atmosphere of 
animal life is to others, however, healing. The cow- 
boy is made ruddy by the strong effluvia of stables. 



SINNING AGAINST THE HOLY SPIRIT. 29 

It is getting to be understood that sleeping together 
is dangerous. The London Lancet warns people that 
as civilization heightens our refinement, it renders us 
more and more subject to injury from such close inti- 
macy. Of two children the coarser will destroy the 
outer life of the other and devour him . The atmos- 
phere is only ' the spiritualized body ; as air is only 
etherealized earth. Murder is committed more slowly 
but quite as certainly by attacking the atmosphere as 
by attacking the body. 

Virtue can be protected and moral life kept pure 
only by guarding the character's outer approaches. 
High life can be permanently lived only where the 
whole being is sternly protected against the influences 
of a corrosive sort. Moral life, in fact, is only a part 
of our general life . It is the sustenance of physical 
life of a fine sort — that is, a spiritual sort. Moral ac- 
tions are the application of this life to the assistance of 
others. 

Occasionally we meet persons whose presence we 
say is very helpful to us. We are more healthy for 
their being near us. They calm and steady us. But 
more than that, we are conscious of being better 
morally because of the association of some people. Of 
some one it was said that he converted souls by efflu- 
via; that is, he was surrounded by so holy an atmos- 
phere that evil could not live in it. Great moral 
teachers are of that sort. Personal magnetism is only 
a loose way of describing this power. You can tell 
what kind of candidates have led a political canvass by 
the spirit that is brewed. Mr. Moody and Mr. 
Moody's followers constitute a class. 

Now combine these powers as you very, very rarely 
find them combined, and you have a person whose 
presence gives you both peace and joy, physical 
strength and moral power. An atmosphere surrounds 
him , that to you is as near a panacea as is possible. 



30 LIBEETY AND LIFE. 

In him you have a great healer — healer of body and 
soul. Should you resist this benign and holy influence, 
prefering to subject yourself to less ennobling or more 
gross spirits, it would evidently be a sin. But what 
kind of a sin? A sin, I think, against a Holy Spirit. 
Not entering just now on the question whether there 
is a Holy Spirit of a sort very different from this, 
whose authority depends not on his spirit helpfulness, 
but on his divine will, I want you to consider the 
power of the Holy Spirit in man, and the consequences 
of sinning against it. 

Whatever the body, such precisely is the atmosphere ; 
and such precisely is the will or inner nature of a per- 
son or thing. So that a person's will and desire is 
operative quite outside of the body. A bad character 
goes beyond the tongue and arms. If the person is 
sensuous, his atmosphere is the same. If ambi- 
tious, his atmosphere is the same. A motherly 
mother can be known by her presence of this sort if 
you do not see her, or know of her being near. Her 
motherliness is outside of her as it is inside. 

The atmosphere about a body is made by or of the 
body, and cannot be unlike the material of which it is 
made. Precisely as the elements of the air are the 
same as those of the earth ; and as the sun being mol- 
ten metals, its atmosphere is vaporized metal. 

A strong bad will is, therefore, more dangerous in 
its subtle atmospheric pressure than in language or in 
flesh. Coachman escapades with delicate girls are the 
consequence of a coarse, strong animal influence sur- 
rounding those who do not know how to resist. 

There are veritable cannibals to be found in every 
community. They do not eat your organized life; but 
they greedily devour your life material. They grow 
fat on the destruction of others. They are vampires of 
our atmospheres, sucking away the material which 
belongs to our bodies, though not yet wrought into 



SINNING AGAINST THE HOLY SPIRIT. 31 

organs. We sometimes hear them spoken of as parasitic 
natures. But the parasites are another class that more 
directly damage our bodies. The parasite is lean, 
sickly, always clinging to some one, never sends down 
a root on its own account, but feeds directly on some 
one else. The cannibal, on the contrary, is fleshy, 
rotund and contented. The parasite climbs on and 
breaks down a healthy organism. A cannibal absorbs 
the atmosphere of the weaker. He is of a tenacious, 
devil-fish temperament that devours without a con- 
science. Babes especially are food for such creatures. 
They are especially fond of babes, and fondle them, 
and hug them, when the poor things scream with 
agony. Children are often compelled by mothers to 
go to and kiss such beings, or to sit on their laps. 
Now, of all things, a babe has its atmosphere least 
formed, as its body is least organized. It is weak in its 
outer foldings. It should not be fondled and hugged 
by any one; not even by its mother; but handled 
with first regard to helping it to be an individual, a 
self, not a mere scrap of others. There are more babes 
murdered or permanently disabled by cannibalistic 
fondling than by cakes and grease and other food that 
never has any other effect than to hinder growth and 
prevent health. 

Nor can we too emphatically comprehend our danger 
in entering into any close association whereby we sub- 
ject our wills to the wills of those that operate about 
us. The first law of morals is seZ/*-control and self- 
possession. 

For children bad people are worse than bad words 
and bad actions. They should be brought up in close 
relation to plants and trees, and guarded against pro- 
miscuous atmospheric contact. If you do not believe 
this, watch your children for a while, and you will find 
that they make up to visitors or are repelled, not by 
words or looks but by a subtle charm, or the opposite. 



32 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

And if a child be strongly attracted, he becomes 
absorbed, flushed and often feverish. Then you will 
find further that that visitor has more or less power 
over the child. 

When 1 was in college one of my professors, after a 
class had left the recitation room, would say, "Open the 
windows and let the rest of the senior class go out." 
The room was charged with the presence or atmos- 
pheres of the young men. Their tangible bodies were 
removed, yet something was left. Any one compelled 
to house an exceedingly gross physique, whose atmos- 
phere is fairly called effluvia, knows that a room is 
often thus charged for weeks after the man is gone. 

There is a good deal of a person thus to be perceived 
as still present days and weeks after his death. In my 
own experience a friend was dead and buried> but his 
atmosphere remained as a companionable presence for 
a month after. I have frequently heard similar remarks 
made by those who had lost friends. Precisely the 
bearing of such facts upon spiritualistic phenomena, or, 
as it should be called, psychical phenomena, I will not 
undertake to define. Does the spirit at any time lose 
the body and survive as a subtler organism, is open to 
belief. 

The atmospheres about worlds are world stuff. Life 
stuff is the atmospheres about living beings. Bodies 
are made of this life stuff or material, as well as give 
it off. Bodies are no more wholly made of what we 
eat, than plants are wholly made of the soil in which 
they grow. You weigh a plant that has grown in a tub 
containing twenty pounds of earth until itself weighs 
ten pounds, you will find that it has taken only a few 
ounces from the dirt. The rest of its weight has been 
abstracted from the atmosphere. The same is true of 
our bodies ; they grow from the vital stuff about them 
more than from the food put into them. Vital stuff is 
everywhere. It is organized by us atmospherically 



SINNING AGAINST THE HOLY SPIRIT. 33 

before it is organized physically. Some faint, fragile 
people have too little organic or organizing force. 
Such people often thrive only in company with a com- 
panion of an opposite tendency. One thus organizes 
for both, but the weaker one becomes very much like 
his other half in more ways than in temperament. The 
weaker one thus gaining strength may have the stronger 
will. 

Life material is unorganized body ; body is organized 
matter. The atmosphere, however, being in part 
given from the body, has the same general qualities of 
the organized body. Some are grossly licentious, and 
if their atmosphere surround you, it is with an influ- 
ence of that sort. Others, and perhaps the larger num- 
ber, average as appetite servers ; their thoughts are of 
eating and drinking. They are servants of appetite. 
They affect you on that plane. The keenly intellectual 
again fold you in an influence that stimulates your 
brain; and may intensely weary you without words. 
The organs of the brain also affect the atmosphere. 
Love is thus predominant in many, pure and chastened, 
and very vitalizing to the hungry. Charity or benevo- 
lence surrounds such natures as Jesus, and occasionally 
one whom we meet in our common life ; and if this be 
that warm, large, "bene-volens" or good wishing, which 
desires well for everybody, it is well for everybody. 
The gift of atmosphere of this sort is more sweet and 
grateful than loaves of bread, and money. Health 
flows out in the same way from the nicely poised, well 
developed organic life. 

Rarely, yet at times, you are approached by organ- 
isms that diffuse about them an atmosphere that is 
remarkably balanced, in which no organ of the body 
exercises predominance ; and yet on the whole, not nega- 
tive, but very positive persons. This I take it, is the 
ideal toward which civilization should point. Intensity 
in one direction is not health, nor does it impart health. 



34 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

As we approach this condition we shall all be healers. 
There is no other way of explaining the healing power 
of Jesus, and many more equally authentic cases. 

The philosophy of faith cures is largely the power of 
strong wills to charge their atmospheres with health 
and will and confidence. The believer becomes subject 
for the time being to another organizing force. He is 
likely very soon to relapse. Faith is simply a substi- 
tution of another for yourself. 

Conversions are of the same sort. They are depend- 
ent on faith. The atmosphere of a powerful organism 
is allowed to permeate and control an audience. Intel- 
lect is trampled down. Will is predominant. In a 
revival the leader first organizes his supporters. These 
form a combined atmosphere that is called the Holy 
Spirit. Those who yield to it yield to the man at the 
head and become for the time a part of his body. 
Atmospheres combine, until one will operates among 
thousands. In a camp meeting a whole grove is per- 
ceptibly charged with this strange life material charged 
with one purpose. This cannot endure. It breaks up 
into fragments. Discord follows. No individual can 
easily restore himself. Confusion and chaos of per- 
sonalities follow. Sensuality is likely to flame out in 
those who before had themselves in higher control. 
Gossip, hate, strife, lust are the consequences invaria- 
bly of this necessary breaking up of the unifying of a 
thousand atmospheres. It is a unity not of individuals, 
but a unity produced by breaking down individuality. 
After you have escaped you may not easily restore 
your personality to its normal shape, perhaps you never 
will. Danger lurks wherever feeling predominates 
over reason. A Salvation Army inevitably ends in 
vice. 

T never attended but one camp meeting of revivalists, 
and that was with a friend of my own temperament. We 
entered the grove at the very climax of the combina- 



SINNING AGAINST THE HOLY SPIRIT. 35 

tion of will power. Within half an hour my friend 
left me. Standing alone for a few moments, amazed 
at the profanity and brutality of the preachers and 
prayers, who were fast pulverizing the wills of 
enquirers, I was physically shocked from my fingers 
to my elbows, as if I had taken hold of a powerful bat- 
tery. The effect was to produce a strong impulse to 
fall down with the rest, but an antagonism led me with 
almost equal force to shout profanely. Evidently my 
moral nature was breaking down with my physical. I 
had power and sense left to flee, and that I did as 
speedily as possible. My friend meeting me assured 
me that he had experienced to some extent similar 
symptoms. The woods were full of the concentrated 
will acting in one great atmosphere, and whoever came 
into it was individually lost and absorbed. 

While living in St. Louis, Hammond and his workers 
possessed the city for a while, as much as a man pos- 
sesses his body. They affected every person in the 
city and every possible operation of life. One orthodox 
clergyman opposed their work. The man was so 
deeply agitated and overpowered by the combined 
will against him that he became a victim of their 
prayers. His tongue was paralyzed while preaching 
on Sunday. He was so far crushed as to at least be 
unable to oppose. Mr. Moody is a safer man than 
the majority of revivalists, because he is an honest 
man. 

Dying begins in the loss of the life material. The 
body is deprived of its reservoir of material from 
which to rebuild waste. The atmosphere in used up 
and there is no power to provide more. The cushion 
against infringing forces is thus lost. The old have 
no guard against the dangers about them. Cold and 
heat and the jars of every day life hit directly on their 
bodies. They are easily broken down, crushed out. 
We guard them with our own atmospheres. Some of 



36 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

them are able to give out so much love that it for a 
long time takes the place of a more dense atmosphere. 
We respect it. We tread lightly about them. 

But the tissues follow the atmosphere. The organs 
shrivel. The loss goes inward. The organic centers 
that we call will and intellect disintegrate, and the life 
material goes back into the universal. 

I now wish you especially to note that what is called 
the power of the Holy Ghost in great assemblages is 
nothing more than the power of human ghosts, or more 
simply human atmospheres. It is the confusion of 
individualities, and the crash or break down of nature's 
effort at producing conscious will. The result is often 
unconsciousness; sometimes insanity; frequently a 
physical power, which is not self-power, but the power 
of the crowd, concentrated in one. It is not of God at 
all, nor is it of a devil, but is a purely natural phen- 
omenon. The fact is, we have given ourselves almost 
no study, attributing anything strange to either a God 
or a devil, a big supernatural power of some sort. The 
Holy Ghost is simply a term to cover our ignorance of 
ourselves. The one most important of all public enter- 
prises is the endowment of professorships in our uni- 
versities to encourage psychical research. It would 
quickly reduce to the natural what now constitutes the 
basis of supernatural religion. 

We are rapidly learning that emotions dependent on 
excited and crowded meetings are not religious what- 
ever, but are human, and are often dangerous. The 
building of the individual is the one great end of 
nature and evolution; it is also the true end of man 
himself. Whatever throws back the individual into the 
mass compelling him to have common emotions, com- 
mon notions, common actions, is reversing the creative 
tendency in nature. Man is nature become self-con- 
scious; he ought also to become self-controlling. All 
influence in the name of religion, however sacred in 



SINNING AGAINST THE HOLY SPIRIT. 37 

public estimation, that awes a man or terrifies him, or 
forces him by infringing on his personality to conform 
to mysteries, called the influence of the Holy Ghost, is 
detrimental to manhood, to character. He only is truly 
religious, who, following the command of nature to 
possess himself with knowledge and honesty, seeks to 
enable others to rise into the same independent self- 
control. The end of education is to know yourself, 
own yourself, and be an increasing self. Let no man 
or body of men break down the outermost approaches 
of self-control. Praying for the 'Holy Ghost is for the 
most part a method of securing a submission of indi- 
viduality to a directing human force. 

It is equally important to remember that to a divine 
influx we often attribute love, and that in popular esti- 
mation love is only less divine than worship. Indeed, 
Jesus reduces all religion to a love for God and for 
man. But love in practical usage is no more nor less 
than the attraction of one whose atmosphere, or 
approach, is in some way agreeable. This is not at all a 
matter above careful study and exact science. Loving 
is not a divine something that falls upon us, but a 
purely human affair with exact causes. That this most 
important relation, the union of persons and personali- 
ties, should so generally end in confusion and disaster, 
is because, as yet, loving is not considered as having 
any defined cause, but to be a sort of holy inspiration. 
I would not rob it of its poetry, but a song that ends 
in a quarrel loses its poetry without assistance. In 
marriage, as elsewhere, the whole person, the atmos- 
phere, the full physical life of each member should be 
entirely respected. 

The question is sometimes asked of late, 
Will the human race still evolve to any great 
extent ? 

Yes, the individual has yet to be created — the rights 
of the individual yet to be established. 



38 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

I suppose some came here to-day expecting to hear 
me say that a man could by the use of a few words or 
by a hasty curse sin against the Holy Ghost. A lad 
in St. Louis once came to my house, and pulling me 
one side, whispered to me that he was afraid he had 
sinned against the Holy Ghost, for he said that, being 
teased to become converted, he had become angry and 
said, "Damn God." He was in great terror, for they had 
charged him with sinning against the Holy Ghost, for 
which there is no pardon. I stooped down and kissed 
him, and told him I guessed God would do the same if 
he got a chance. " But I don't want to be converted," 
he said. " I wouldn't be, if I were you," I said, " at 
any rate not by other folks." "What then?" "Why, 
you might convert yourself a little," I said, "and not 
swear any more than you can help, and keep your 
temper." He was a keen witted, loving chap, but fire 
from top to toe. 

Had he sinned against the Holy Ghost? By no 
means. 

The Holy Ghost of the Bible is evidently a survival 
of the primitive worship of the dead. They were sup- 
posed to have become ghosts, and to haunt their old 
abodes. They were fed and cared for, and finally wor- 
shiped. All good came from their will, or their influ- 
ence with higher spirits. All evil came from their* 
anger. The ruin of souls, the coldness of the churches, 
national disasters are supposed to be from the with- 
drawal of the Holy Ghost. They are purely natural, 
both in cause and consequence. To the ghosts were 
attributed even the parentage of children, and especi- 
ally fine characters, like Achilles, iEneas, Buddha and 
Jesus were said to have been begotten of a Holy Ghost. 
As the gods became one god, the ghosts became one 
ghost. Of course, originally gods and ghosts were the 
same, but they became differentiated — one to act as 
pure power or will, the other as active force. So Chris- 



SINNING AGAINST THE HOLY SPIRIT. 39 

tian theology inherited the Father Creator; the Spirit 
as Quickener; and then added the Son. The disciples 
were baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and 
the Holy Ghost. The ghosts came as tongues of fire 
and led to hysterical displays in their crowded assem- 
blies ; such phenomena as come from overheated brains 
and unstrung nerves. 

Animal or vital magnetism, with all its strange phen- 
omena, is dependent on the morbid condition of a per- 
son in his relation to others, the breaking down of the 
atmospheric power that protects individuality. If you 
seek for a total disruption of self, seek it through mag- 
netism. Its more strange phenomena I have entirely 
avoided mentioning, because that would require a too 
large widening of my topic. Mesmerism is contained 
in this truth that every one has a remarkable influence 
on his neighbor, and under certain conditions this 
becomes ruinous. The requirements are susceptibility 
or sensitiveness, and faith; which are the fundamental 
requirements to religious manifestations. Suffice it 
for my purpose simply to say that science and good 
sense demand just the opposite conditions ; knowledge 
instead of sensitiveness, and critical investigation in 
place of faith. 

By my illustrations drawn out in a shape that shall 
show how one may destroy himself or allow others to 
do it, you can see the way to sin against the Holy 
Spirit. 



A SOUND MIND IN A SOUND BODY. 

America is not only peculiar as a land requiring an 
immense outlay of work; it is also peculiarly adapted 
to recuperate the worker. 

I went the other day to get a man to dig a well, and 
was told he had gone over to Trenton Falls for a day. 



40 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

At the depot was a large party starting for the Thou- 
sand Isles, average laborers. 

The workmen rusticate as often as the capitalists, 
and get a great deal more out of a week's lay-off. Now 
that Sunday has been recovered from supernatural 
cowardice, the worker has his seventh of time for pic- 
nics, strolls in the woods and drives. Reason says he 
should have it, in order to secure a sound head and a 
sound body. The best use of God's day is to straighten 
the bones of those who get crooked with honest labor, and 
to clear the smoke out of their brains. Sunday is a sanitary 
institution. Nature is our free physician, and she doc- 
tors with sun, good air, relaxation, laughter and games. 

What a handsome recognition of the general need of 
soundness is the greeting we get and give! I remem- 
ber in my boyhood, when the Oneida Indians were still 
here, that the old door-latch would rise and two or 
three of the blanketed tribe would march in and 
silently seat themselves. After a space one would say : 
"Got pork? Buy basket? How do?" Now in his 
mind pork stood first, basket second, and "How do?" 
stood last. Civilization has for its end to reverse this, 
and put the pork last and the health first. So. in 
greeting one to-day, I say, first of all, "How are you? 
How do you do?" Are you sound in head, heart and 
limb? Can you digest your dinner well? Can you 
read a wise book and digest that f 

Whatever stands in the way of a sound human being 
must inevitably get removed. If any one says, " It is 
a pity that theology can not be let alone!" I say, 
" Madam, if your theology has put the pork first and 
the man Jast, it can't be let alone!" Any theology that 
does not despise the body, and that puts all its saving 
forces into the field for this world, will never have any 
trouble with skeptics. 

But I go into the foulest kennels and there I find 
the stoutest believers. Not an ounce of salvation for 



A SOUND MIND IN A SOUND BODY. 41 

this world, but pounds for the next! Soap and a sewer, 
and less pork and more pure water are the sacraments 
they need. Now I find that about all the water that 
the church cares for is enough for one baptism — and 
that is mostly a sprinkle on babies! 

Can it be possible that the age thinks more of health 
and brains, and of good digestion, than of salvation? 
Yes, that is the tendency of this age. We really begin 
to care more for hygiene than for the Lord's Supper. 
A sound mind in a sound body is more needed than 
your sacraments. 

Men used to talk about the soul as something apart 
from the body, that in some way used the body, but 
could not do so without being endangered by its lusts 
and earth iness. Now all philosophy has for its final 
word that the soul and the body are equal in size, and 
that perception, purpose and will are in every cell of 
the body, from brain to foot. If you, who are in your 
brain conscious, wish to save your soul, you must save 
what is its homestead, the body. And so you must 
save your body as well as your soul. 

The other day the papers told of a woman in Scran- 
ton, Pa., who held her boy's hands on a hot stove 
while she prayed, and ordered him to pray God to cure 
those hands of a propensity to steal. We call that 
barbarism. The court called it a crime. Yet that 
woman's barbarism has been practiced in all ages 
as a method of salvation. It is perfectly rational if 
salvation consists in being rescued from the body — if the 
body is an evil thing, to be punished. Luther crawled up 
the Vatican stairs on his knees. But when he opened 
his eyes to the real salvation he married a sweet woman, 
and walked in the garden with her and the babies. 

When I was in St. Louis the city had hundreds of 
ponds inside and close about its limits; these were 
covered with green scum, and were pestilential. But 
I have seen such ponds as full with plunging, puff' 



42 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

ing youngsters as plums in an English pudding. But 
not one of those chaps ever jumped in without cross- 
ing himself, and most of them wore amulets blessed 
by a priest. So the religion of this age does pre- 
cisely what it did for prehistoric man — it prays and 
incants, but it does not fill up the stagnant pools. An 
intensely pious friend of mine, worth eighty thousand 
dollars, lived where one of these ponds pressed up to 
his yard. The last time I saw him he and his wife 
were on their way to England, carrying their last babe, 
a poor bit of sickly flesh, that was half idiotic with 
spinal meningitis. His greed and stupidity had killed 
all his children, but he was very religious still. He 
hoped to meet them on the other shore, he said. I 
could not help telling him I hoped the other shore 
would not be the edge of a green scum pond. But 
you cannot get common sense into such heads until 
you get it out of them that they are pious by praying 
and churchgoing, when they are at the same time 
breaking the laws of a sound body and sound mind. 
The piety that we need is reverence for the body, rever- 
ence for the intelligence, reverence for humanity. 

Vice is very largely the reaction of our natures from 
unnatural love for sickly virtue. No one can yield 
to extravagant religious excitement without reacting 
to extraordinary sensual excitement. Health lies in 
temperate religion as well as in temperate drinking or 
eating. Honest people at camp meetings become the 
victims of sensuous rebounds from overstrained relig- 
iosity. My friends say to me, How can you have so 
wholly given up your old religious joys ? I am sure 
there is no real religion out of health. 

I am glad to say that religious books are becoming 
more healthy in tone ; but you know that till recently 
the sick saint was the ideal of that sort of literature. 

If you will get Lea's History of Celibacy you will 
be astonished to see how for seven or eight thousand 



A SOUND MIND IN A SOUND BODY. 43 

years religion has been a battle in favor of the unnat- 
ural, the unmarried, the unsocial, the ascetic; it has 
been the monk against the family, and it has produced 
nothing but diseased morality. 

The struggle, so far as we can trace it, began in 
India two or three thousand years before Jesus. 
Buddhism was purest monkery. Buddha put away his 
wife and lived a wanderer. Early Christians adopted 
the scheme of salvation by moral x mutilation. For 
eleven hundred years the fight was continued and ter- 
rific. At last under Hildebrand celibacy got control. 

In Newark, N. J., there is a cloistered monastery. 
The cells for the nuns are eight feet by ten, with no 
furniture but a straw bed and a table. Underneath is 
a tomb, where they will all be buried together, Night 
and day two nuns kneel constantly before the "host." 
They all rise at midnight and pray for two hours. They 
then return to bed until 5:30. Then prayer in their 
cells. At 6 prayers and mass in the chapel ; at 8 coffee 
and bread; till 10:30 work; devotions till 11. No fires 
permitted except in the kitchen, laundry, public chapel, 
and infirmary. No one is allowed to speak aloud till 
noon, and never to an outsider. Double grates cover 
the windows, set in walls 18 inches thick. So these 
women are saved by being entombed. These cells are 
most of all like an asylum for lunatics. Is not such a 
religion a phase of insanity, where a morbid desire to 
please or appease a God overturns the mental balance? 
The abuse of the body involves mental disease. And 
I am sure, if you think carefully about it, you will see 
that a good deal of what passes for religion is really 
the work of an unbalanced mind. " Religion," said a 
keen writer, "is a disease." Of course, I do not wish to 
speak against noble character, noble deeds, noble 
thought — but I would protest against the sickly emo- 
tion that passes for religion and which diseases our 
morals. It is an infectious disease ; it becomes heredi- 



44 . LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

tary ; children are born hot for such food ; they can not 
relish the healthy. Two European physicians have 
studied 980 infants, especially 160 from houses of 
refuge. The criminal type was marked in over seven 
per cent. ; the lack of moral sense was clear in 44 per 
cent. ; propensity of crime in 10 per cent. 

In Toulon, to-day, the whole population is rushing 
about in religious ceremonious prostrations, aves, 
implorations of the saints, penances; and the cholera 
nips at the distrait, the most devitalized, the most fear- 
ful, in the very procession with the Holy Host at the 
head, and down tumbles the devout but dirty saint in 
the grip of death. 

The people of Marseilles went crazy, rushing out of 
the city, stopping all industries, so that there could be 
no proper food, no proper care for the panic-stricken 
crowd. There was nothing dignified or great to be 
heard of — all was petty, weak, insane. Only one priest 
went to give communion to a dying victim ; the man 
died ; all ran away from him ; they would not even help 
to put him in a coffin ; the priest, alone, put him in his 
coffin and then buried him. That was not the church ; 
that was manhood. 

The streets of Naples are crowded with religious 
processions, singing and chanting, bearing lighted 
candles, crosses and banners; women parade the public 
places, carrying flowers and decked statuettes of St. 
Genaro, the patron saint of Naples. But the streets 
are horribly filthy. The people are every way unsani- 
tary. They would not mind you if you told them the 
cause of cholera was bad air, bad food, bad sewers. 
They would murder you if you laughed at their 
statuettes. Doctors have run away. This is human 
sanity — the sound mind of the average. 

Now if you will read an account of a Salvation Army 
muster — say at a Hallelujah Wedding, or at a grand 
Assault on Satan's Head Quarters— you will recognize 



A SOUND MIND IN A SOUND BODY. 45 

again this absolute perversion of the moral and intel- 
lectual nature to diseased methods for imaginary ends. 
Major Moore and Sergeant Abby Thompson are just as 
much majors and sergeants as Napoleon and Victoria, 
up at Dr. Gray's lunatic asylum, are veritable 
characters. 

John G. Whittier recently deplored the tendency of 
the press to dwell on unnatural and brutish crimes. 
The morbid appetite of the people craves such diet. 
The paper gives what is readily taken. The odd, the 
horrid, the scandalous, and monstrous, get a large 
space because they get diseased minds to devour them. 
What must be the condition of a mind that daily 
lunches on a column of murders, suicides, and crimes 
against virtue! Look in on such souls and they are 
found incurably diseased. 

I remember when I read the Odes of Horace, in 
Latin, that a sentence struck me as very peculiar. 
Speaking of a certain Balbrinus, who was very much 
devoted to a lady friend, he says, " Balbrinus loves 
the wen of Hagnse! " It was a love of a disease and a 
diseased love. But I have come to learn that a large 
part of human love is of this diseased sort. "Ah ! " says 
a keeper of a morgue, "scores of people come here 
out of pure curiosity — pretending to be in search of a 
lost friend, but really drawn by a craving to look at 
the horrible. They come and come again, and lie con- 
tinually, in order to gratify their morbid wishes! " It 
is a virulent form of that passion which leads some 
people to spend a large share of their time attending 
funerals. They never look at the flowers, but at the 
corpse and its habiliments. It is gossip gone daft. 
The old English language described certain people as 
backbiters, or biters of backs. These creatures are 
hungry to devour the dead; to tell what they have seen, 
and criticise the appearance of the corpse. But you 
cannot get it out of the heads of such people that they 



46 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

are in some way more pious for attending funerals. 
Do they not groan and sigh and weep ? — with some it 
gets to be easy to weep. There is no little of the 
notion that looking sad and thinking of dying fits the 
soul to meet God. Their gossip is sanctified because it 
concerns the sacred matters of the grave. 

A sound mind in a sound body — that is the end of 
religion, as it is of philosophy. Medicine and religion 
are invariably one. To be healthy in our emotions, 
healthy in our wills, healthy in our social relations — 
this is the great desideratum. I can not conceive a 
God who requires of us a service that has any other 
end than our own healthy manhood. 

It is a sad ivant, everywhere. Your jealousies are a 
sickness; intolerance, meddlesomeness, are diseases. 
The sound mind is tolerant. My neighbor hates 
me in religion — another in politics. He cannot 
comprehend the freedom of health and the health of 
freedom. 

Nowhere can we escape curious whims, peculiar 
prejudices, abnormal likes and dislikes. The extent to 
which we are subject to fancies is known to physicians, 
every one of whom has patients who are chronically ill 
in their imagination. One who is troubled with 
insomnia knows how a whim will keep him awake, or a 
whim set him to sleep ; if once he imagines he is going 
to lie awake he will surely do so. Edwin Booth will 
not enter a theatre where the drop curtain has a red 
border. Lawrence Barrett, before acting as Bichelieu, 
invariably must eat exactly one-half of a pie. Andrew 
Johnson had great faith in the number seven; and for v 
that matter it is, all through the Bible, a lucky number. 
Garfield had his lucky number also, and in his last ill- 
ness he relied on its prognostication. 

I have a hired man, who tells me that if he takes a 
couple of currant twigs in his hands, when he crosses an 
underground stream they will (if he holds them tight) 



A SOUND MIND IN A SOUND BODY. 47 

twist in two trying to reverse themselves. This is a bit 
of hereditary mental disease. I sat a friend down 
to planchette one day, and, in half an hour, by soberly 
working on his fancy he believed the machine was 
moving without his aid; but he was most positively 
doing it himself, as I soon showed him. There is a 
certain smack of pleasure in feeling that you can work 
a wonder, or in some way have mysterious power. It 
is your heredity from an ancestry that had its big 
medicine, its fetishes, its amulets, its ignorance of all 
real causes, and therefore referred all things to a 
miraculous cause. Here is my good neighbor, who, 
when the earth lifts the burden of spring on its 
shoulders, doing in an hour the work of ten billion 
horse-power, sits and fans herself or gossips gently over 
her tea; but let a little mixing of currents bring a 
thunder-storm into play, and at once she is struck with 
awe. Her God is running about over the sky, with his 
water pot and his lightning, and she falls to and prays 
that he will spare her arid forgive her sins, — not her 
gossip and her stupid ignorance, and her stinginess, 
but her sins of a churchly sort. In nothing do we 
like to be humbugged so much as in religion. It is a 
great comfort to believe that by some hook or crook we 
are to get out of all our sinful deserts, and, while we 
don't decently use this world, are to get a better one. 
Why, there is no more proof of their fables about 
Heaven and Hell than there is of the cow that on a 
time jumped over the moon. Compensation is true. 
If you will be wise you shall improve; if you 
will do wrong you shall reap the consequences in 
misery. 

You don't quite believe in the divining rod of my 
hired man, but you do believe in the divining words of 
a priest. Now I don't want you to lose aspiration ; but I 
do wish you to see that the words of a prayer can not 
move the laws of the universe, 



48 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

About the time we last met in this hall the land was 
shocked by the wicked failure of Grant & Ward in Wall 
street. We call it a "failure." It was another divin- 
ing rod trick; a plan to turn one dollar into one hun- 
dred by a presto change — not a nickel of worth added; 
no production, no work; only a magical incantation, 
and a fortune secured! Our financial world is to-day 
largely operating on just that notion. 

During the summer months crash has followed crash 
till this last terrible affair at Brunswick, where a whole 
city is found to have lived on a bubble. The bubble is 
touched by a suspicion; wealth is ashes; honest wages 
are found to be stolen; and a score or so of officials 
either tumble pell-mell into self-murder, or grove] like 
idiots in despair. 

When Ward was examined the question was asked: 
" So, then, the real nature of your business consisted 
in discounting the fanciful prospects of imaginary 
profits to be derived from fictitious contracts, founded 
on manufactured artificial contributions of altogether 
imaginary money?" And he said "Yes." And thou- 
sands of men, who are called business men and sane, 
put their money in such sieves. "Let me take a dollar 
and I will make it into five for you!" "Whoever buys 
of me ten dollars, I will give him in addition a clock 
worth ten dollars!" Instead of promptly avoiding these 
people as prima facie scamps, a large number experi- 
ment with them! 

My dear friends, the very latest truths of science are 
yours. No one yet has had a better chance than you 
to have wisdom. The age crowds on us with its les- 
sons. I do not ask you: Are you prepared to die? Of 
all things, I hope you are not. I hope you detest 
decay, and mould, and disease. I ask you rather: Are 
you living by the law of health ? Are you contributing 
your share to the sanitation of society? Are you the 
children of a God whose providence is known only in 



IS THE AVERAGE LIFE WORTH THE LIVING? 49 

the evolution of truth, beauty, purity, strength, and 
reason? For hundreds of thousands of years, Nature 
has moved upward; has built at last a brain; has 
enlarged it, glorified it; has given the world to its 
charge. A mind — a mind — a strong, clear intellect, 
calm, rational — in a body clean and comely, and a fair 
partner of a soul — this is the only religion worth the 
name! 

IS THE AVEEAGE LIFE WOKTH THE LIVING? 

No question more concerns us than what is the real 
value of the life we are living! for we are, ourselves, 
worth not one whit more than our thoughts and deeds. 
The immortal part of the soul- is its life already lived; 
that is indestructible. The old myth of saving a soul 
from its Maker's wrath is no longer a trouble to one 
who comprehends himself. The question now is how 
to save the soul from tendencies to disintegration and 
degeneration. The eternity of the soul is each day. 
The judgment is in its tendencies to die. Heaven is 
its good adjustment to its environments. Hell is the 
soul dying. Ileal life is always joy; but when the soul 
gangrenes it suffers as the body does when any part of 
it is diseased. Dissatisfaction, unrest, fretfulness, are 
signs of spirit decay. Sin is dishonesty to yourself. 
The first readjustment of morals as we forsake artificial 
theology is to see that our highest responsibility is to 
ourselves. No man will ever stand in a higher court 
than his own conscience. No one claims love and honor 
like your own spirit. If you cannot respect yourself, 
you cannot respect God. If your soul is abashed in 
its own presence, it has already stood before the judg- 
ment seat. The court of conscience is surrounded by 
mirrors in which you behold yourself. If you are 
affrighted at yourself there is no need of a devil to 
affright you. The only devil, then, is yourself, seen 



50 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

in these mirrors. To shut your eyes to yourself, and 
see your neighbor's follies is a trick that does not 
improve your own condition. The strongest law of 
human morals is to love your neighbor as you do your- 
self. If you cannot love yourself, you cannot your 
neighbor. If you hate your neighbor it is a recogni- 
tion of your own hatefulness. The loving character is 
a lovable character. Gossip is a soul battling its own 
meanness. God originally means the divine in your- 
self; whatever comes from our own goodness comes 
from God. You will never see any more of God than 
lives in your own soul. Cultivate godliness, if you 
will see God. It comes true that the kingdom of God 
is within you. You cannot find God by going from 
life to life or from world to world ; you must create 
divine conditions within, and these will beget God, as 
all life depends on conditions. Any mother may be a 
Virgin Mary to conceive holiness of the Holy Spirit. 
The universe is to us what w r e are to it. Man is not so 
much made as he is maker. The soul is the only Cre- 
ator we ever see at work. It makes its own body. It 
creates a universe about itself and peoples it. No two 
live in the same universe, because they do not create 
alike. Of the same material one makes a Hell, the 
other a Heaven. Friendship means that your work 
and mine approximate. Matter is only raw material 
for souls to work in. But the greatest thing the soul 
creates is character. It determines itself. If you work 
badly I cannot atone for you, neither can a God. Your 
work is you. It is the fact that has damnation in it. 

Religion begins with the unconscious cry of the 
babe. It means dependence; and to be religious is to 
fulfill our relation to the interdependence of nature. 
Every atom of matter is naturally interactive; so all 
soul life is affected by all other soul life . Duty means 
that w r e cannot exist alone. The babe's first lesson is 
to distinguish another from himself; at that moment 



IS THE AVERAGE LIFE WORTH THE LIVING? 51 

his own duty begins. By and by grows out of his 
experience the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule expands 
into decalogue; but not even the decalogue is infallible. 
The race can count up its experiences on <one hand. 
What you cannot get into the Golden Rule never came 
out of it. We are bound by no morality that does not 
come out of human experience. Ritual is not reason ; 
it is not experience, it is experiment. You cannot make 
religion of its experiments. Ritual is an effort to for- 
get yourself. Reason is an effort to know yourself. 
Ritual says, keep a day holy. Reason says, you alone 
can sanctify a day; but if you yourself are not noble, 
how can you ennoble a day ? Ritual says, pray. . Rea- 
son says, a good life is a prayer; and a bad soul cannot 
pray. If you wish for pardon, go and pardon. The 
forgiver is forgiven. Ritual says, placate God with 
honor. Reason says, worship, words, praise, adoration 
can no more honor God than their flattery can agitate 
the sun. The fire worshiper never made the sun move 
any faster or slower. No devotion at prayer ever made 
the Supreme mind any more mindful. My only power 
with God is my power over myself. The devil never 
offers kingdoms to those whom he finds do not rule 
themselves. Neither does God. The virtuous soul is 
bound not only to rule within, but also without. 
"Know thyself" is always followed by "know all 
things." The end of knowledge is discontent; the end 
of discontent is knowledge. The chief end of man is 
to be manly. God is not a word that solves mysteries ; 
it is simply a word to cover our ignorance. What we 
cannot understand w T e refer to God. As fast as we find 
anything out, we say it is not of God. Cyclones are 
no more the w r ork of God than the wind caused by a 
butterfly's wing. When a prayer meets lightning, the 
prayer must give way. 

The one great work of humanity is to get over its 
mania for the supernatural. The Church is busy try- 



52 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

ing to blow down Jericho's walls with ram's horns. As 
a matter of fact nature concerns herself no more about 
us than we do about the ants when we plough. And 
she has less need to do it because we are better able to 
take care of ourselves. The poorest way of using time 
is to beg God to take care of us ; we must stand or fall ; 
not by supernatural aid, but by natural law. I saw 
a mother leave her sick babe to go to spend forty-eight 
hours in devotions. She feared God was about to take 
her child from her because she had failed in her relig- 
ious duties. I said, "You had better be at home caring 
for your sick babe." "Ah!" she replied, "I must pray 
God to heal him; I am afraid he is sick on account of 
my sins." I said, " Do you think God is poisoning 
your baby on the sly because you have not said prayers 
enough?" "But, God is a jealous God and requires 
our worship." "Then," said I, "you should have 
nothing to do with him ; we become like our compan- 
ions; a bad God is the worst of friends." So the poor 
woman spent forty-eight hours to appease an ugly 
being whom she feared had infected the babe with 
scarlet fever out of spite. But the fever was the result 
of praying too much and knowing too little. The thing 
needed is to know the facts about us. There is a power 
in filth that prayers cannot match. Try your prayers 
on hay fever. Prayer is the spirit with which we do 
things. It is a true, honest desire to do right things 
in a right way. 

To believe in progress is to believe in God. To lack 
faith in progress is the real atheism. Skepticism is a 
ghost. It is not worth fighting. It is only the shadow 
of a new and higher faith coming after. Men 
doubt only to come at higher conceptions. The skep- 
ticism that injures is to doubt the power of good over 
evil, and the presence of a divine certainty in the uni- 
verse. Infidelity is unfaithfulness to principles. The 
atheist anchors himself in shallow water and sees 



IS THE AVERAGE LIFE WORTH THE LIVING? 53 

the shore behind him. His sails are useless. A soul 
is motion, activity, progress, unrest; it is the capacity 
of endless aggression. It is never so easily damned 
as to bind it to immovable ceremonies and creeds and 
social routines. What the church cannot do to undo a 
soul, society and bad education accomplish. Buying 
and selling is swapping dirt. If trade be the end of 
life, it is the end of the soul. A woman who consults 
the street before she consults the law of life and truth 
places the gossips above angels. Every one comes 
into the world inheriting a law book. His first duty 
is to learn to read it. God writes fresh words in it as 
fast as we spell out the old. The decalogue of Moses 
did not precede the law to love God and your neigh- 
bor as yourself. The law of love was the law that 
rocked the first-born babe. 

Life is worth living only when it has positive val- 
ues. Despair is the result of trying to reap wheat 
where chess was sown. If you price yourself cheaply 
men will not pay it, but if you are priceless they will 
proffer you all they have. 

The soul is not the pet of a God for which He made 
the universe. Man must take his place in nature just 
as the trees do; and if he fulfills his functions he will 
thrive. The peculiar glory of man is that he can turn 
evil into good, his peculiar disgrace is that he often 
turns good into evil. Nature has just taken in the cold 
rains of April and turned them into green lawns and 
hyacinths. 

What to do with our troubles and Hindrances 
is the great problem of life. It lies with us to make 
them into violets in the soul, or into thorns. But man 
only can turn evil into moral ends, and grow r a grand 
character out of disasters and difficulties. The saved 
soul is that one in which griefs end in joys and opposi- 
tion ends in triumph. No being can feel the losses of 
life like man, yet the loss of friends has made the 



54 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

noble mothers, the trusty brothers and the kingly 
fathers. 

The greatest need of religion is to get rid of the 
idea of paradise as coming from the final paymaster of 
saintship. The only saint is the one who compels life 
to be a paradise. The material for Heaven is all around 
you, build it if you will. No God will ever build it 
for you. He is not a divine mason to put up mansions 
for those who cannot use His worlds. 

The chief consolation to the mourner is to know that 
he should not mourn. If we look up instead of down, 
the roots in the cold soil are leaves and flowers swing- 
ing in the May sunshine. I do not need to be told of 
another world to compensate for this. This one is com- 
plete in itself. The machinery is all here for making 
character. 

The finest parts of the finest souls have been made 
of sorrows. An eternal Heaven would damn angels. 
If children came without mother's pains, there would 
be no mothers. You could not conceive a Jesus as an 
unburdened soul. He is simply the one. who most 
masters evil, within and without. 

So you may look around to-day upon the gladdening 
earth, born of the frosts of January and the rains of 
April, and say that April showers and winter's frosts 
are a necessity to a healthy and lovable character. 
Only be sure that you do not submit to grief, but be 
the master in every position of life. 

" Weave in the threads of black, O weaver, 
That sittest now at life's broad loom; 
In good be evermore believer, 

Who wills can make life's sorrows bloom. 

Weave black with gold and morning red; 

With smiling trust the shuttle throw; 
' Give us this day our daily bread,' 

Means he that reaps must also sow. 



THE TRUE, THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE GOOD. 55 

And he who now at wrong is wroth 

Shall rind far down the web of life, 
The lily woven in the cloth, 

And joy and peace from human strife. 

Weave all that life spins at the wheel; 

'Tis but the dye that maketh black, 
The wool is ever white, and weal 

Shall come where most was seeming lack." 



THE TKUE, THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE GOOD. 

The real trinity that fills the universe and claims 
our adoration is the true the beautiful and the good. 
They are literally three in one. You cannot be good 
without being true, and to be both true and good is 
to be essentially beautiful. If you examine nature 
under a burdock leaf where the bird has hid its eggs in 
a tuft of grass, or in the expanse of the heavens , in an 
October leaf or in a mountain landscape, you will find 
three things: (1.) Truth, a law of life. (2.) Beauty, 
so involved and multifold that even the microscope or 
telescope can only begin to reveal it. (3.) Goodness, 
for under the leaf is motherhood and devotion ; and in 
the stars is the infinite adaptation of matter to purposes 
of intelligence and joy. 

The world is made up materially of something less 
than one hundred distinct elements. These combine 
in different proportions until we get all the complicated 
organisms which make the marvellous variety of forms, 
from a crystal to a breathing animal. Man's body 
takes in a very large proportion of these elements. His 
body contains the gases like oxygen and hydrogen, the 
minerals like iron and gold, and the salts. 

The spectroscope shows us the whole sidereal 
universe made up in the same way. Iron, gold, hydro- 
gen, oxygen everywhere in different proportions. So 
you get from a few elements at last a realm of universal 



56 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

force and motion, but a realm of peace and harmony. 
This in its entirety, a magnificence beyond our imagina- 
tion, we call the body of God. 

Now will you think of the universe as something 
else than a combination of elements, as operative with 
moral and intellectual life ; and you will see that it is 
from atom to star, from monad to man, from man to 
society, from society to humanity, from humanity to 
God, only these three principles which I have named 
taking shape and expression. Back of and within 
all things lie truth, beauty and goodness. These, 
interacting, bring matter and force up to duty, honor, 
joy, love. You must not think of truth as a tree, 
beauty the flower, and goodness the fruit. Truth is a 
principle of thought, of feeling, of action. We may 
think not only a falsehood but think facts falsely; we 
may feel love and feel it falsely; we may act honorably 
but without the truth of honor. So the beautiful is a 
positive principle. We are as much under obligation 
to be and do and think the lovable as we are to 
speak and live the truth ; a noble character is inherently 
beautiful. Man has no right to be an exception to the 
struggle of nature for the sweet, pleasant, attractive 
and harmonious. The beautiful is a final or universal 
thought, and not an atom escapes it. 

So also is goodness a primal law, and therefore a 
duty. It enters into the ethics of the universe. To be 
good is a law of the tree as well as of the sentient man. 
There is a philosophy in the old Hebrew myth that the 
Divine being has always looked on the evolution of the 
universe, and said each day it is good. Goodness is in 
it all; it tends to betterment. Evolution is not toward 
the evil. 

So then, think of the universe, and our little globe 
as a part of it, made up and moving forward on this 
triune thought, the true, the beautiful and the good. 
You cannot analyze these into anything more primal; 



THE TRUE, THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE GOOD. 57 

all we can say is, they are fundamental moral elements. 
They are like the gases, salts and metals of the 
material realm which they interpenetrate, manipulate 
and rule; and how wonderful is the work! 

Pick up a crystal, a white dodecahedron or" a rhom- 
boidal cube. It is part of a story that links us to ages 
before man. It tells part of the great truth of geology. 
It is one step on which mind climbs up to reach God. 
But it is also beauty; beautiful in color, in form, in 
reflection. You will set it on your breast as a type of 
purity and grace. It is equally continent of goodness ; 
for this crystal and its fellows are the solid foundations 
of matter. The crystal of sugar ministers in every 
direction to your needs; the crystal of salt is necessary 
to health and life. They are all servitors, faithful and 
true. They help on the evolution of life and mind. 

Pick a flower from your autumn hazel. It tells you 
the same story ; it pleads its desire to be a part of the 
truths that constitute man's wisdom. It is a fragment 
of science. For beauty it is a delight to the eye, that is 
loth to lose its summer. For goodness it has its mite 
of woof and warp in the loom of the year's products. I 
have chosen the simplest illustrations; but how much 
more pertinent is the mission of the grand old elm that 
has inspired a Longfellow; that has waved its pendant 
grace over a thousand children; that will finally warm 
with its chips the chilled body of some Goody Blake. 
How finely do the true, the beautiful, the good arise in 
form and expression in the sweet beech grove which is 
a part of the history of your county as well of plant 
life ; which has softened the contour of the rugged hill, 
and delighted the tired eyes of a century ; and has flung 
down its autumn gift three score times on the shouting 
children of the cottage that it shelters. 

I am never so glad as when my children, preserved 
from some of the evil teachings of my own childhood, 
show me a worm and say how beautiful it is. To me 



58 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

there are many hideous things made repulsive simply 
because of a bad education. I am satisfied that the 
universe has nothing naturally unpleasant in it. 

But this triune something, these subtle moral forces 
that thus lie back of matter, are still more apparent as 
the principles of a true character. In man the true, 
beautiful and good come to consciousness. They 
become self -observant. When you consider him as 
these essential ideas self-operative you get at the true 
definition of a human being. The physiologist tries to 
discover certain muscles in which we differ from the 
highest animal forms, but our true distinction is that of 
being self-conscious of eternal principles. 

Take the type of the child with more or less of 
unconscious truthfulness in him, with the unconscious 
grace of heredity and the charming goodness that is 
as yet one half impulse. How admirably are the three 
blended in his spontaneity. 

But the mother is a better illustration, nature has 
never made a better; for the finest thing she has ever 
yet produced is a human mother. Truth was never 
so clarified of the least trace of the false as in her 
relation to husband and babe. Beauty was never so 
unalloyed, so exquisite as in her form and expression. 
And can goodness be conceived like the devotion of her 
life to her loved ones ? 

Trace these same principles farther out and you 
conceive the absolute true, beautiful and good as some- 
thing worthy of the very worship of your soul. 

You say, if God be absolute beauty, how ineffably 
happy will we be to behold him. I say, open your 
eyes and you see that very loveliness which is his 
presence If God be truth you say how wonderful will 
it be to hear his voice teaching us as our Father. I 
say, open your ears and you will hear the divine voice 
of truth in all hours and places. If God be goodness, 
you say, let us long for the time when we shall enter 



THE TRUE, THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE GOOD*. 59 

into his mansions. I say, reach out your hand and 
take what his goodness crowds upon you. But mark 
this, you can see no more of beauty, hear no more 
of truth, and get no more of goodness then you are 
fitted for. Jesus had a subtle philosophy in the words, 
" He that hath ears to hear, let him hear." We live 
in actual contact with God's three attributes and they 
are to us as we are to them. The road to God is the 
road of a noble character ; the more true, beautiful and 
good you are, the more you see God. 

There is therefore nothing in the world so grand as 
a human character that is devoted to the true, nothing 
so beautiful as a soul devoted to the lovely, nothing 
so good as a good soul. A fine character is the 
highest revelation of God that can exist on 
earth. Religion is not to believe, but to be. It is 
the eternal law of this eternal trinity wrought into 
a life. 

Here I come to a landing place, where we must 
stop a moment, for I want you to see that religion 
is something that embraces not merely goodness but 
truth in its larger acceptation, and equally includes 
the beautiful. You are aware that religious teachings 
have often denied this. The Puritan battered statuary 
in pieces, burnt fine paintings and went to an ugly 
shed to sing his rude psalms in an appalling method. 
The old creed warns us against the world as well as 
the devil. Science is excluded from any place beside 
David's psalms and Paul's epistles. Art has been very 
unfortunate; in the middle ages it was a part of 
religion; the Catholic so holds it to day, but the 
Protestant world denies it. To read in a church pul- 
pit from a most important essay of John Tyndall on 
health, or a lay sermon on every day duties, from 
Huxley, or Dr. Brown, would be considered a profane 
innovation Religion allows however a reading from 
the history of Ahab or Saul, or from a love song of 



60 LIBERTY ASiD LIFE, 

Solomon. The demands of an enlightened age require 
a wider and truer definition of the religious. This is 
an age that thrives on science and the industrial arts ; 
Sunday should be largely devoted to instructing the 
people in these things. As soon as the people get 
over their morbid reverence for the ritual forms of 
antiquity, they will get such things. Then they will 
pay as much to know how to have a healthy house- 
hold and a home of intrinsic beauty, as they will to 
know how to pacify an angry Deity ; and they will get the 
teachings they need. Remember I do not say leave 
religion and go to art; but that pure art and true 
science are a part of religion ; to live wisely is better 
than worship; to live happily is better than to seek 
future happiness, to beget noble children is better 
than praying for the making over of bad ones. My 
good friends, religion has become a very narrow term. 
It covers not our wisdom and our full manly duty, but 
our faith in books, forms and doctrines, and our pray- 
ing , worshiping and glorifying. But still more I find 
myself naturally, when talking on religion, drawn into 
an apology for including the beautiful at all under 
that term. As if there were religion in an art gallery; 
as if there were religion in an autumn landscape. 
Were the Puritans in the seventeenth century, while 
tearing down pictures and mutilating statuary — were 
they really insulting religion, or was theirs a sincere 
protest against painted sensuality? I am sure they 
were honest, but I am equally sure that when they 
fled from the fleshy carnal devil, they ran into the 
arms of an ugly devil, who was not one whit less 
devilish for being as plain as the whitewashed wall of 
his meeting house. There is really nothing to choose 
between a piety that covers nastiness, and a piety 
that covers cruelty. 

A riper definition of religion restores us to the 
lovely, the fresh, the joyous. 



THE TRUE, THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE GOOD. 61 

When I became emancipated from Calvinism and 
supernaturalism, I found myself growing younger. 
The world was no longer an accursed place, and no 
doom was attached to living a reasonable life. I feel 
every year younger. There are no cares that can 
crush like the awful responsibility of living every 
moment in danger qj eternal torment. I see myself 
now in a charming heaven — the world is as lovely as 
I can appreciate. The great law that le'ads me on into 
the autumn of life, leads me by ways of indescribable 
loveliness. And if you will turn over history, you will 
find all great religious revolts were renewals of men's 
youth. Jesus was as fresh as a June day; Socrates 
was as boyish as the young fellows that hung on 
his words. When Luther broke loose from the monas- 
tery and its repressions, he dropped his tears and 
fears, got married, sung, played, romped and was as 
happy as if he had been born again. Jesus' teachings 
are in one sense poems, in another they are fine art 
sketches. The beautiful was always present with 
him. 

When you thus consider the nature of the true, 
beautiful and good, you see how dangerously evil is 
their perversion. The reverse of the true is the lie, 
and on that a large proportion of human character is 
formed. The opposite of the beautiful is the super- 
ficial and gross, and much of human life is modeled 
on this false beauty. The opposite of the good is 
hypocrisy, and we know too well how all phases of 
life are poisoned with this false good. 

The world is cursed as badly with superficial and 
show beauty, as it is with heartless goodness. We 
shall not reform by simply becoming good ; reforma- 
tion must cover the true and the beautiful, science, art, 
society, politics and the state. Confucius made all 
religion to be a fulfilment of our duties as citizens 
and as children. The Christian overlooks this except 



62 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

as a secondary matter. It is needful that we see 
religion as covering all our relations to the world; 
whatever lowers us as to worth, manhood, strength or 
character is a crime. Whatever makes us of more 
value to ourselves or others is religious. In this way 
it is religion to have as lovely a home as you can. 
Shiftlessness and unthrift are sinful. Beauty of cloth- 
iDg, household art, all are a religious duty. A lying 
beauty, a false beauty, is the worst of criminals. It 
is the incarnation of the irreligious. 

I have stopped a good while on this which I called 
a landing place, for it really is an all-important mat- 
ter. Men must not consider that love for nature arid 
love for astronomy is only carnal. When I stand 
under the night sky and it thrills me with sublime 
joy, it is not any less religious because I do not praise 
God with a prayer or a psalm. When I can make ten 
acres of soil to minister to the peace, purity and joy of 
a thousand persons by making those acres an expres- 
sion of truth and beauty, I am doing as truly a religious 
act as if I induced those thousand persons to kneel in 
prayer. It is religion, said Mahomet, to make your 
neighbor smile. 

My friends, I have said that this world shows us 
nothing so fine as a true, beautiful and good character. 
It is unfortunately not yet the rule of human nature to 
fairly exemplify these three. But sometimes in our 
relation to them, we find one who is as true as he is 
good, and as beautiful as he is true ; a man with the 
gentleness and kindness of a child, but the grand 
power to bear heavy burdens of care; a man sturdy and 
brave and unflinching in the truth of his character, 
generous, charitable, large-hearted and open-handed in 
his goodness, and of that peculiar lovableness that 
makes you think of him as one you could not bear to 
separate from your life work. And I say, that you 
and I were fortunate enough to find such a man, when 



NOT ALLOPATHY NOR HOMEOPATHY, BUT SYMPATHY. 63 

we began this Hall movement. When we have thought 
of it, we have thought of him ; we have felt as if we 
gathered around him as the warm heart is the center 
of the body. He was the heart of our movement; 
every one felt his worth; felt his generous impulse; 
and we all loved him. Children never saw him with- 
out noticing him; women admired him without a fault 
in doing so, and were glad of his friendship. Deter- 
mined in will, unflinching in purpose, defiant of 
wrong, a despiser of the mean, a hater of the wrong, 
did any one ever know him to sympathize with the 
false or compromise with the bad? yet when it was 
possible to be gentle and sympathetic and forbearing, 
who could be more so? With a will like iron, he was 
still capable of easily yielding to the inevitable. True 
to himself, true to principles, true to his word, true to 
religion; beautiful in his friendship, beautiful in his 
love of nature, in his adoration of the divine life in all 
things, in his respect for human rights, in his family 
relations ; good, solid good, in his whole life work. 

" Oh enviable fate to be 
Strong, beautiful and armed like thee 
With lyre and sword, with song 1 , and steel, 
A hand to strike, a heart to feel.'' 

This rare man was ours. He is ours still ; the joy of 
our thoughts, the pride of our society, the result of 
our principles. He lived like a man, he died like a 
man. We shall not forget him. Do you suppose God 
will? 



NOT ALLOPATHY NOR HOMEOPATHY, BUT 

SYMPATHY. 

I have not joined these terms together simply to 
separate them, but because they are only parts of one 
general art. The power of drugs is the power of 
material substances to affect the chemical action in 



64 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

our bodies in such a way as to promote vitality and 
hinder excessive decomposition. Which principle of 
administering is most valuable belongs to medical 
practitioners to judge. We are only sure that, being 
ourselves a part of nature in its evolution, there is no 
part of the vegetable or animal world which does not 
affect our physical condition. Not a leaf swings in 
the forest that does not by its functions affect the 
functions of the human body. Not a root hides in 
the earth that is not by the fact of its existence a 
force to render us more or less vitally strong. Nor 
does an insect exist so insignificant that as a scavenger 
or otherwise it does not affect the air we breathe, and 
so our bodies. The later researches tend to show that 
our worst diseases are the effect of microscopic vege- 
table and animal existences, that, under certain con- 
ditions, have power to feed upon and destroy our 
organism. The simple law that causes carbon gases, 
which are deathly to us, to decompose in a rose leaf, 
there using up the carbon and releasing the oxygen to 
purify the air for man, and in that way bringing about 
conditions of healthy vital action on our part, illus- 
trates the close relationship that exists between all the 
parts of nature. We get no proper conception of our- 
selves as separate from or above nature. We simply 
involve more complicated interaction of natural forces. 
The bird that wings its way overhead; the worm that 
crawls in the soil ; the great oak that spreads its arms 
at our door; the reed that grows in the pool; the bee 
that makes honey from flowers, and the mosquito that 
turns vegetable decay into insect life, all are parts of 
that vast unit in which man also finds his place. Nor 
would it be impossible, were that my present purpose, 
to show that not only are all forms of life interactive 
and mutually co-operative, but that they are, and there- 
fore we are, in no way separated from nature in the 
larger sense — the universal organic and inorganic mat- 



NOT ALLOPATHY NOR HOMEOPATHY, BUT SYMPATHY. 65 

ter and force that comprise the universe. How much 
of our present well being depends on the principle of 
magnetic attraction? The fact that a needle of iron 
points to the north by a law that we do not compre- 
hend, but which we can use, has made commerce pos- 
sible, as otherwise it could not have been. Or going 
farther out we have of late demonstrated that our 
existence is not only dependent on a motion in uni- 
versal ether called heat, and another called light, but 
that every throb 4>f the solar pulse is felt on this world. 
Our great storms are not ours only, but belong to the 
whole solar system. So the babe in the cradle is liv- 
ing by a process that we call chemical; the separating 
or decomposing of the elements that* float over his 
head or compose a drop of milk, and their recomposi- 
tion is under an influence that we call life. That babe 
is also not only rocked by his mother's hands, but he 
is swung by gravity through space, and his cradle, the 
earth, is rocked by the sun. The roses and lilies out- 
side his window kiss their hands to him with oxygen, 
and he breathes a baby's love to them in carbonic gas. 
Life is only one form of the action of chemical forces 
that act elsewhere in waves of the sea, in billows of air, 
or in the tongues of flame. Life is not a foreign force 
in nature, not an invader of a territory in which it 
assumes lordship. Organic life is the all pervading 
force of nature, that always existed, assuming a special 
direction. The true physician is the student of the 
relationships that exist in nature. He is mind applied 
to machinery, discerning where there is an excess of 
action in any one direction, and counterpoising it by 
setting in action the forces temporarily held in a drug. 
How far he can do that depends on more than his 
knowledge of the body, he must know also how the 
body is influenced by mind, and he must also be a stu- 
dent of the relation of the great comprehending uni- 
verse to that part of the universe which he medicates. 



66 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

There is in human affairs no more marvelous essay of 
mind than when it thus undertakes to supplement and 
amend the processes of living. For if you will study 
the body for one moment you see it to be a very diffi- 
cult thing for the soul to control a very large part of 
the mechanism with which it is connected. Besides 
this, everybody has a great network of specialties in 
the way of likes and dislikes, attractions, repulsions, 
inherited biases, which we call idiosyncrasies. Added 
to this the body functions are so keenly associated with 
moral feelings and moral inclinations that the power to 
untangle a man for one moment, and set in play forces 
to produce healthy chemical action and vital action is 
the most difficult of all powers to secure. The 
good physician is supremely the calm student 
who works not by rigid rules, but whose mind is 
open above all other men to the entrance of new 
convictions. 

No one can live at all who does not have a good 
power of dying, that is, the composition of our bodies 
depends on decomposition. To stop decomposition is 
to stop recomposition. - For instance, if I touch my 
finger to this paper, just as surely a3 if to a red hot stove, 
a chemical change takes place. Let a ray of light 
touch the eye, and then with great suddenness starts a 
chemical action, a mere touch of death, which is 
immediately repaired by the machine itself. The doc- 
tor has to consider and work upon this marvelous 
machine that lives by dying, that repairs itself, and 
that after all is so far from perfect that it is never cer- 
tain not to fail at any moment at some point. The 
problem of nature is this, can a machine be made so 
perfect as to last forever ; a body that can perfectly 
repair its own waste and never fail to do it? 

You will readily see that if nature be such a unit, 
and no part independent of any other, it is not likely 
that when our physical power rises into another condi- 



NOT ALLOPATHY NOR HOMEOPATHY, BUT SYMPATHY. 67 

tion, that we call moral and intellectual, that this 
mutual dependence wholly ceases. Is it likely 
that we, whose lives hang on the leaves, and on a 
whifT of gas, or a decoction of bark and spices, that 
we do not directly affect each other's lives? The 
power of one human being over another is not con- 
fined to the physical force that he can exercise, but is 
equally a psychical power. There is not a scientific 
authority now recognized who does not affirm a peculiar 
power of one person over another in a way that can- 
not be explained by known laws. It does not help 
us to call it magnetic or electric or psychic — this is 
only to classify it, not explain it. 

Under the title of sinning against the Holy 
Ghost, I showed the power for injury that lies in 
simple human intercourse — in the impinging of our 
subtler organisms, or the atmospheres which sur- 
round our bodies. At that time I showed more 
especially the damage thus done by reckless human 
intercourse. For this reason some people are wholly 
unfitted to serve as nurses of the sick. They absorb 
the vital atmospheres of the weaker so that a nickering 
life or a person whose organism is largely dis- 
organized by disease is destroyed by their presence. 
On the other hand there are nurses who largely aid the 
sick and strengthen the weak by a power to impart. 
This power in extreme cases has always been recog- 
nized and persons very richly endowed with the giving 
art have been considered workers of miracles. Jesus 
is far from being the only one in history who was 
reckoned to be divine as much for his healing power 
as for his words. But you will notice that his words 
also were connected in popular notion with healing, for 
they were called words of life, that is life came to the 
listener through the words of the sweet and healthy 
one. It is, however, of this healing art as a human 
gift that I wish to speak, and not as a divine. It is a 



68 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

faculty of humanity, that needs to be comprehended or 
at least recognized and studied. 

This individual power certainly was less marked in a 
low stage of social life, when men lived in a nebulous 
state and there was little individuality. That is true 
to-day in savage or degraded races; yet the medicine 
superstitions of even savage life are based on vague 
phenomena of a vital sort. 

But as civilization makes each individual to stand out 
sharply denned and distinct, it makes the physical 
relation of individuals to be definite and important. 
The low-lived herd with impunity, but you could not 
endure for a day such chaotic intercourse. It would 
not so much demoralize you as it would disorganize 
you. It would break down the vital atmosphere about 
you, and then encroach on your organized life. So 
you would find the power of human beings to kill you 
without a blow. But the power of individuals is of 
the same sort. It is felt more sharply when you are 
weakened by sickness. I remember the influence of 
different physicians on my vitality; one came as a 
great noise would come; self-conceited, knotted and 
tied up with self, he brought only drugs ; himself of no 
account any more than if he had been made of bass- 
wood. Another came cheery, warm, vital, a few June 
words, a tonic atmosphere. His physic was hardly 
thought of, his physique did the work of healing. 
When very sharply pulled to*pieces by an acute, sud- 
den attack, I was tortured by the presence of a very 
kind friend, and was obliged to send him away. 
Another helped me quite as emphatically to restore my 
organic condition. 

In a morbid condition about 1873 I found it impos- 
sible to endure the general vital atmosphere of a cer- 
tain church. To say that I felt pride, hypocrisy, and 
that cf a very aggressive sort, would be a strong 
expression, but it was true. In another church to 



NOT ALLOPATHY, NOR HOMEOPATHY, BUT SYMPATHY. 69 

which I repaired, although the preaching shocked me, 
the moral atmosphere was tonic. I went there to get 
a soul bath, as I would have gone elsewhere for a 
Turkish bath. Feeble natures are frequently crushed 
out, trodden down by necessary intercourse, with 
haughty, coarse natures. The wife withers ; the fragile 
neighbor is put out. You may thus comprehend what 
is meant by Jesus' refusal to break the bruised reed. 
His intent was not to crush but to lift up. And I want 
you to see that this lifting is a physical affair as well as 
a legal. His life was pre-eminently beautiful as a heal- 
ing life, and it does not seem possible to dissociate two 
elements in his career, his power to heal and his power to 
teach; he did not reach souls any more than he did 
bodies. Brush away the nonsensical miracles and you 
have still left a person with remarkable power to give 
health to both body and mind. Was this the power of a 
God, or a purely human power? Are we compelled to 
accept the stories associated with Jesus as authentic 
and deny all those affirmed of others? I am aware 
that when we come into this region of sympathy we 
are in the field where superstition and stupidity as well 
as fraud can work their miracles; but for that very 
reason it is a field into which we ought to carry serious 
investigation rather than give it over to quacks. 
Recently several universities have established profes- 
sorships of Psychical Research; and scientists are 
endeavoring to discover the Jaws that underlie our 
spiritual powers. And by spiritual I mean only a 
more subtle refined physical; for that spirit is sub- 
stance, and body is substance, is now well understood. 
Mind is not an effervescence of nothing nor a mere 
secretion of matter. 

Of late a peculiar feature of the public press, I refer 
to such papers as the Post, Times, and the Independent 
of New York, and equally prominent papers of Boston, 
London and Paris, has been the discussion of what is 



70 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

called Telepathy. This is another of the pathies you 
see. It means the power to feel with others at a dis- 
tance, literally to suffer at a distance. And there have 
been a vast number of instances published, well authen- 
ticated by eminent men, of such a power to enter into 
others' conditions when physically separated by great 
distance. One instance was substantially this: A man 
and his wife, of superior intelligence, lived in a district 
in Michigan devoted to lumbering. They were of 
peculiarly strong telepathic power and understood 
each other without words, which they ceased almost 
wholly to use except when communicating with others. 
In separate rooms they could instantly tell what the 
other had written. Each was subject to the mood of 
the other. At great distances to comprehend each 
other became a severe effort, but near by it was almost 
absolute. In January, 1881, the man, while chopping, 
severed an artery and bled to death. At the time of 
the accident his wife rushed out of the house to her 
neighbors avowing that her husband was dying, and 
led them at once to the spot in the forest, although 
she had only telepathy to guide her. She has been 
insane ever since. This is not the only case of insanity 
caused by the breaking apart of two blended organisms. 
I do not quote such cases as mysterious, or that people 
shall become credulous of remarkable statements; on 
the contrary to destroy the tendency to credulity we 
must recognize facts. Tennyson, when a young man, 
you know, dearly loved Arthur Hal lam. They were 
deeply sympathetic; and in one of his poems Tennyson 
describes their relation as follows: 

" Each by turns was guide to each ; 
And Fancy light from Fancy caught, 
And Thought leaped out to wed with Thought, 
Ere Thought could wed itself to Speech." 

That is they were able to feel in unison. Allow for 
the poetic nature of the expression — there still is in it a 



NOT ALLOPATHY NOR HOMEOPATHY, BUT SYMPATHY. i 1 

very common truth. Two old people that have loDg 
lived together, and suffered and joyed together are very 
likely to have but one vital heart; they die together. 
And in every man's experience, after carefully allowing 
for natural credulity, there is enough to demonstrate 
the power of one over another in this subtle form of 
sympathy. I was, when pastor in Adrian, enabled to 
befriend a boy of about eighteen. He was, soon after 
our acquaintance began, taken sick. During his ill- 
ness I was often with him, and he held very closely to 
me. One night I awoke with a severe and sudden 
startle. The impression was so very strong that he was 
calling me that I was on the floor dressing myself before 
being fully awake. Accustomed to trust only to my 
senses, I drove myself back to bed, considering the call 
a result of having been been with him until my nerves 
were unsettled. But I noted the hour. The next day 
I found that he died at that hour. Such occurrences 
ought to be severely and sceptically examined; yet 
they are too numerous to be denied on general principles. 
Of late we have heard more and more of faith cures. 
Civilization and culture are not proof against 
phenomena that they are inclined to scoff at. And as 
a rule faith cures are mixed up with so much credulous 
folly that they provoke sharp criticism. Sifted of all 
silly talk about the Bible and the Virgin and Jesus, 
the philosophy of these cures, which cannot be denied, 
seems to be this, that one person has a power over 
another to effect his body functions. Concentrated in 
a strong will one may very powerfully affect others 
who submit their wills. But when two or three, or 
more, are united in one determination, they are 
stronger than one person alone. When a large num- 
ber can be concentrated the effect is proportionately 
strong. This is a dangerous power and fortunately 
cannot often be exercised because unity cannot be 
secured. If it could be certainly guided by wisdom 



72 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

and benevolence it would be well. But we know it 
would not be. Revivals of religion are the strongest 
illustration, both of the power and the probable evil 
use of it. It is used to break down and crush indepen- 
dence and freedom. Nature demands and works for 
individuality. 

Faith cures are rightly named. They demand two 
things: (1.) A powerfully organized and concentrated 
will. (2.) On the other hand a submissive condition, 
called faith, The whole matter should be divested of 
supernaturalism. It is not God, or the Virgin Mary, or 
some saint. It is the exercise of human power; a 
power, however, so weakly possessed by most people 
that they are unconscious of their property. But the 
danger is not all on one side. Individuals cannot exist 
safely alone. Health of body and mind depend on 
human intercourse. We need neighborliness. Robin- 
son Crusoe is faithfully drawn to show the tendency of 
a mind without companionship. Solitary imprisonment 
dements and kills; mind and body both go down before 
it. Thoreau's experiment was no more than a long 
retreat from social friction. Temporary seclusion is 
of vast importance to highly organized persons. But 
it is equally important to get back to companionship. 
Many graces come from the life of a maid, but man}/ mor- 
bid angularities as well. A bachelor is sometimes a man 
of sound sense, but he is rarely full weight ; and pretty 
sure to grow lighter as he grows older. Human inter- 
course must be based fundamentally on the idea that a 
man is incapable of complete physical development except 
under the influence of woman ; and reversely it is true of 
woman. There is nothing more important, as there is noth- 
ing more beautiful than the faith which underlies the 
union of soul s. This trust is often a mistaken one ; yet, for 
all that, the great medicament of society is faith. On 
it is based that home life which leads the human race 
to constantly higher perfection. It underlies trade;* it 



NOT ALLOPATHY NOR HOMEOPATHY, BUT SYMPATHY. 7.3 

underlies commerce in the larger sense; it underlies 
internationalism; it underlies the breaking of fetters 
and the noble humanity that is growing to control the 
world. So faith is a curative force in every direction 
if wisely employed. Occasionally a large, richly endowed 
spirit undoubtedly gives by its means physical health. 
And you may be sure that in like manner disease 
spreads its power. The most important criticism on 
faith curing is this, that disease and corruption go by 
faith equally well. And this also it is important never 
to lose sight of, that faith curing and faith killing are 
not confined to special institutions or to religious 
devotees. These ends, either of life or death, are 
reached constantly in every circle, in every family. 

It is equally bad when a very good person with some 
refinement undertakes to do as Jesus did. He is just 
strong enough to be moderately safe if he is sur- 
rounded by the best influences ; but is quickly pulled 
down to the level of the base, if he tries to be their 
friend. I don't mean there is any one in the world 
who is unfit for moral sympathy, unable to do good by 
sympathy, or the better for emotional idleness; I only 
mean that when a man goes beyond his power morally 
he collapses morally, as when he goes beyond his 
physical strength he breaks down physically. John 
Stuart Mill gives his plan whereby persons of " high 
intellect can retain their higher principles unimpaired." 
His theory is aristocratic conservatism, and is quite as 
dangerous as the opposite course. Shut yourself up 
to a course of moral self-preservation and you will be 
moth-eaten in a year. Expend your sympathies with 
extravagance, and you will bankrupt yourself. Politi- 
cal life is too large to make many statesmen ; it ends 
in making a vast number of politicians. These mostly 
settle down as pot-house expounders of the Constitu- 
tion, or in the half-way house of a clerkship or con- 
sulship. To convert the world is the ambition of a 



*74 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

vast number who only become brawlers of righteous- 
ness in bad grammar. 

Referring to my previous discourse there is no 
attempt more dangerous than the effort to be sympa- 
thetic beyond our capacity. Because somebody else is 
very good it is no reason why we should try to be; as 
it is no reason why I should try to be a mathematician 
simply because my neighbor is. The effort of a petty 
goodish sort of chap to be like Jesus results, not at all 
in making a second Christ of him, able to bear on his 
heart a world of trouble, but it makes a maudlin 
ranter of him, preaching love that he has no concep- 
tion of, and bringing ridicule on all Christ's followers. 

The demand for sympathy is a very general mistake. 
After a discourse which runs down my vital independ- 
ence, I am inclined to wish that people shall agree 
with me. It takes some little regathering of self 
before I can leave that affair quite to itself; not with 
indifference, but with no worry. The housekeeper 
demands your sympathy in her routine of cooking and 
cares. The dyspeptic wants sympathy in a dozen 
imaginary and contradictory ailments. The result is 
discomfort. But when you pass this over to religion, 
and you are required to sympathize with the methods 
of Tom Jones in saving the world, when you really 
think his efforts are spoiling what little of the world 
he can get at, you are more than discomforted. 

It is astonishing how many people live in narrow 
grooves of experience. Such people cannot help cor- 
respondingly narrow grooves of sympathy. I have 
several times in life lost the friendship of certain old 
people. It puzzled me for a while to understand why; 
until I noticed that there is a stage in old age when a 
man begins to tell over the same old stories and regale 
you with the same old occurrences. He does it with a 
gusto and manner that shows his interest, but it is the 
same sort of interest every time; and he will tell the 



NOT ALLOPATHY NOK HOMEOPATHY, BUT SYMPATHY. 75 

same thing ten times a day. Now he has not begun 
to fail in intellect or emotion, but he has stopped 
growing. He will afterward simply live over himself, 
moving round and round in that which is finished. At 
this point he loses interest in new things; they annoy 
and fret him. His creative energy is over. His Sun- 
day has come. If you will sit down with him, he is 
pleased. If you do not, he feels it as a criticism. The 
result is very soon that he throws over your friendship. 
So I saw that the old should take special care not to 
lose sympathy with life. You see the same groove 
life in those of very limited culture. They go over 
and over the same notions from morning till night. 
My hired man has one sublime passion, it is that he is 
the smartest workman in the range of his knowledge. 
He repeats over and over his champion feats of mow- 
ing, hoeing and trenching. He has about a half dozen 
traits, and a degree of passion but I think no loves. 

Here then lies this general law, that large natures 
are not only able to handle large problems, to enter 
with zeal into matters of wide and general human 
interest, but they are equally capable of sympathy 
with matters of very simple sort. You may lay it 
down as a general rule that a great astronomer will 
love flowers; that a man who can write a treatise on 
political economy can write a good story for children ; 
that a great jurist knows how to play a game of romp 
and do it with all his soul. The really great are great 
as made up of small things. No one need tell us the 
children would love Jesus, or that dogs would love 
Walter Scott. If you find a man who does not see the 
children in the streets, you may be sure he is a mental 
and moral yard stick. His theology, if he be a Doctor 
of Divinity, will be in the clouds and very cloudy. 
There is this difference between old-fashioned giants 
and modern giants, that the old one must be a hun- 
dred feet high and weigh tons of flesh. The modern 



76 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

one is but a little fellow; yet with a bit of machinery 
he will throw a bigger stone, and throw it farther, and 
no bragging about it: — I mean that when you find a 
man with a big heart, a great mind, he fulfills all the 
offices of life, has power for spinning a top or for com- 
manding armies. You may be always suspicious that 
a noted man who is too big for commonalities is a 
fraud every way. The ablest senators in Washington 
are the most full of fun and geniality. The least able 
flounder like whales in shallow water if compelled to 
be boys. Coleridge said that genius was only a power 
to be childlike. Large power, then, is large sympathy ; 
a wide reach of adaptability, a capacity to enter into 
others' feelings. Autocratic, arbitrary natures are not 
great, they are cheats, and will be so esteemed in time. 
They are people who cannot look into any other minds 
but their own ; who expect every other one to conform 
to their methods of thought and who really imagine 
that no one has any feelings out of their groove.. 

Of course we grant that there are some general human 
traits. Human intercourse must be based on the general 
idea that minds act alike; that two minds, moved upon 
by the same influence, will make common responses. 
Otherwise two persons could no more understand each 
other than a cow can comprehend an eagle — but even 
the eagle and the cow have in common a desire for 
food and an instinct of self -protection. But human be- 
ings must have tens of thousands of feelings in com- 
mon in order to co-operate in the complex relations of 
body life, and intellectual progress. The teacher must 
know that a boy's mind is not fundamentally unlike 
his own or he will see the futility of trying to give 
his own thoughts over to the younger. Yet there is a 
vast variation after all; and the same thought given 
to a hundred people will result in a vast unlikeness of 
impressions. We imagine we know others from know- 
ing ourselves; the probability is there is in others 



NOT ALLOPATHY NOR HOMEOPATHY, BUT SYMPATHY. 77 

very little of ourselves. Now a great nature is no 
more nor less than one who contains in himself the 
contents of a great many others; has in himself a 
wide range of thoughts, feelings and comprehensions. 
Sympathy is his characteristic, because he feels with 
others as well as sees with them. This is very differ- 
ent from nervous distress over people of all sorts 
which is not sympathy at all, but selfishness, generally 
mixed with vulgar conceit. 

All language was originally an expression of phys- 
ical states and conceptions of such states. The mind 
or soul as a spiritual something, not physical, was not 
recognized. Gradually the human race has come to 
speak of mind and body as two separate, but not yet 
separated entities; they are united temporarily. 
My views coincide with those who believe that we 
should review our notions of matter and mind and 
accustom ourselves to think of mind as a condition 
of life depending upon physical causes. Mental states 
are the result of bodily states. Sympathy is a result 
of organic conditions. If you wish to sustain har- 
mony of feeling you must sustain certain physical 
causes of such harmony. If from being a cause of 
pleasant sensations to the eye, ear, touch and the at- 
mospheric senses, you become a cause of unpleasant 
sensations, or become negative, you destroy the sym- 
pathy between yourself and friends. This may as well 
be comprehended as to lay the fault to the fickleness of 
those we love. Superabundant attachment and devo- 
tion on our part often become a pain where moderate 
love would be agreeable. Mrs. H. B. Stowe says 
wisely, that when you are in a fretted state or are other- 
wise unfitted for harmony you should avoid discharg- 
ing your peevishness on your friends. Emerson ad- 
vises never to talk of your pains to your companions. 
Yet social intercourse is very largely a battery of 
troubles, discharged at our friends. It is not because 



78 LIBERTY AND LIFE, 

the affairs talked about are petty , but because they are 
weighty, and they hurt, annoy and break up harmony. 
You can hardly conceive a more absurd folly, than two 
persons each struggling to interest the other in per- 
sonal griefs. Neither cares for the other, but only 
wishes the other to care for him. If this ever pro- 
duces any sort of sympathy it is that degradation of 
sympathy seen in mutual agreement to backbite. The 
harmony of gossip is that which exists between 
wolves so long as a carcass is supplied; when 
that is exhausted they feast as pleasantly on each 
other. , 

In medical formula sympathy always carries this 
idea of physical cause. One part of the body is said 
to sympathize with other parts. A pain in the eye 
results from a disordered stomach. The brain cannot 
invent healthy thought when dyspepsia prevents di- 
gestion. So a bit of cabbage in the stomach blots out 
a theorem of La Place, or a play of Shakespeare. I 
understand very well the danger of going too far in 
this direction and making thought a mere secretion of 
the brain, and the soul only a phenomenon of material 
particles. But I understand equally well the greater 
clanger incurred by living or trying to live as if the 
body could be neglected or abused, and the moral 
states not be equally degraded. 

Sympathy can be perpetuated only by carefully sus- 
taining those physical conditions which cause the sym- 
pathy. If after marriage it occurs, as it so often does, 
that the fine vital atmosphere is rendered gross or 
deathly, you will find discord and pain. 

I have preferred to use the word sympathy to tel- 
epathy. It is a better word. It expresses a larger 
power. Allopathy is the science of understanding 
others' sufferings. Telepathy is the power of compre- 
hending others' sufferings without visible means of con- 
nection. Sympathy from sym, together, and pathia, 



NOT ALLOPAPHY NOR HOMEOPATHY, BUT SYMPATHY. 79 

suffering, means entering into others' troubles; being 
bound with them by your free choice to help and sus- 
tain. It expresses a subtle law of human oneness. 

But we are only skirmishers in investigation unless 
we go farther back to ask why and how human nature 
has this interfused power — this unity which in love 
bears blossoms, in faith bears fruit. 

Plainly it can be only for this reason, — because we 
all rise out of the universal eternal Supreme Life of the 
Universe. We are possessed not of forces that we 
have created, but that we have inherited. Our bodies 
are made of old material, common material, every 
atom of which and every function of which is mu- 
tually related. Your hand, and my hand are very 
closely related. So our physical substance and our 
spirit forms are phenomena, not creations. 

We say, and say very justly, that nature is cruel; 
that is, not regardful of our existence. So far as the 
phenomena that we call nature are concerned this is 
undeniable. It is a question, however, if we really, to 
any extent, come in contact with real nature. It is 
getting to be, of late, justly affirmed that all that we 
see is only the phenomena of something else — life as 
we see it is only the transitory manifestations of a uni- 
versal and real life. Underneath, or back of all that 
appears, is a self-existence, an eternal substance in- 
volving personality and consciousness. Do we, in 
our intercourse with nature, go deep enough? Do we 
get below the manifestations of power to the power 
itself? If we do we get at the real omnipotence. 
The highest faculty of man is that by his self-con- 
sciousness he can do this very thing, get at the su- 
preme consciousness, the primal eternal One. The 
animals cannot do this. Npither can man except in 
his highest conditions. This underlying power is no 
more like your common God than like any other ihing. 
We pray to the Gods; we reach omnipotence only by 



80 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

sympathy. Do we love the divinely good, the true, 
the beautiful ? — then we are entering into oneness with 
the One. Do we seek to know the absolute right ? Then 
we are coming into accord with the One Life. We are 
getting below phenomena. This sympathy is life-giv- 
ing — it is healing. Jesus heals us only as a soul in 
accord with the divine soul. His body is only an ap- 
parition of his soul and like it in nature. 



THE TBUE LIFE. 



Of course I do not intend to undertake to tell you 
how you ought to live. I don't know that I can explain 
better what I do mean to undertake than by a picture 
of the most wonderful age the world has ever known. 
I have told you before that Socrates, Buddha and Con- 
fucius lived at the same time; one in India, one in 
Greece, and one in China. It will not seem inapt if 
we suppose these three men to be a little nearer, in 
fact to be together ; for since their death their influ- 
ence has floated together. Suppose then Confucius 
and Buddha to be spending a few days with Socrates 
in Athens; of course, as they are very marked, decisive 
characters, they are here for a purpose, they are hold- 
ing a conference to discuss the true purpose of life. 

Socrates is a dreadfully ugly looking fellow, but you 
can see is very confident and very calm. He is sure 
that he has discovered the folly of his age, and found 
the solution. Confucius is smooth-faced, tall and 
portly, giving you the impression of a retired business 
man; but what a head! he fears nothing and is 
quite as sure of himself as Socrates. Buddha comes 
in the garb of a beggar. Socrates does not seem to 
know what he has on ; probably Xantippe, his wife, 
dressed him while he was explaining to her what is a 



THE TRUE LIFE. 81 

model republic. No wonder her temper was tried. 
Confucius, on the contrary, is exceedingly careful of 
every fold of his dress; his silver buckles shine, and 
his silk robe is worn with magnificent grace. Buddha, 
however, is quite as positive a nature as either of the 
others; his mendicant shirt does not hide the exquisite 
beauty of his form, which is not sensuous, but the ideal 
of vital health. His face is lovable and yet strong; 
for a man's face is never lovable that is not strong. 
You would feel like saying dear Buddha! as soon as 
you saw him. Confucius reminds you of any great 
scientist who is busy making discoveries or inventions 
to enable science to feed the crowd; he looks to be 
what we call a practical man. It is the stomach of the 
crowd that he considers first ; Buddha is as evidently 
considering their souls; and Socrates their heads.- 

Alcibiades, a young fellow of the Greeks, has invited 
them to his house and spread a feast. Buddha pulls a 
crust from his wallet, and, praying devoutly, refuses 
anything else. Socrates supposes himself to be eating 
heartily, but really scarcely devours a morsel, so busy 
is he talking. Confucius with considerable ceremony 
eats a hearty meal, laying aside a portion for the gods. 

The feast over, Socrates begins the discussion. "You 
know," he says, " my friends Buddha and Confucius, 
why we are met to-day; our subject of discourse is 
salvation, how to save man from sin and loss; Buddha, 
we will first hear from you." 

Then Buddha dropped on his knees, saying; "O 
Life! O Light of Life! O Life of my soul, illumine me. 
I am nothing, shine within me, light a lamp in my 
soul that I may see myself and know Thy will. Who 
shall overcome the earth and the world of death? Who 
shall find out the path of virtue as a clever man finds 
out a tree ? He who knows that this body is like froth, 
and has learned that all things are unsubstantial, he 
shall break the arrow of death. Salvation is to con- 



82 LIBERTY AND LIFE.. 

quer the flesh, to overcome desire for life; a wise man 
should give up all possessions and all desires; leaving 
all pleasures ; calling nothing his own, the wise man 
thus loses the destructive force of care. No one can 
find peace and pure salvation in household love, in 
wife or in children. He who gives up all attachments 
of a world sort, clinging to nothing, having conquered 
his faculties, he is full of light and peace and is free 
from this world; for the world is evil; to love it is evil, 
it is our taskmaster. Give all to the poor and follow 
me, and I will show you rest. Life is to be gotten rid 
of, it is full of evil. To find God and see him, to enjoy 
eternal freedom from earth-lives, that is the true end. 
Teach men to rise above their senses, to scorn love, to 
seek only God." 

Then Socrates, although boiling full, and never hav- 
ing held his tongue so long before in his life, still 
bound by courtesy, turned to Confucius and said: "O 
Confucius ! is this true ? what say est thou ? Is man to 
be saved by giving up the world and betaking himself 
to poverty and prayer?" 

Confucius answered: "Let me first hear from you, 
Socrates, for I have heard so much of your wisdom that 
I have a longing to know if all the wonderful things 
said of you are true." 

Socrates said: "That, Confucius, is also my great 
puzzle. I am peculiarly anxious to know whether I 
am, as the people say, a wise man ; for really I do not 
know; I only know that the rest are fools, and their 
judgment not worth a bit of copper. But my opinion 
is that those who adopt Buddha's ideas will end in con- 
ceit and hypocrisy. When they think they have given 
up all things, then will they be most completely slaves 
to notions, and whims, and beliefs, and feelings, and 
that, you know, Confucius, is worse than to be a sensu- 
alist. The sensualist lives like a beast, and is happy 
in his way; but the self-deceived are happy only in a 



THE TRUE LIFE. 83 

lie. The world is full of devotees who give up the 
world, but they pray and look for another world. I do 
not see that they differ from the rest of us. I pray 
also, but even as I would throw a crust to that hungry 
dog there; for I think the gods may be hungry for a 
little attention, and what I have to spare I give them, 
also a cock or some trifling gift. But my opinion is, 
a man is saved or made better by nothing of this sort ; 
but he is made better by nothing but knowledge. Sal- 
vation consists in finding out the truth, and one may 
do this only by hard study and by questioning all 
things. I would question the trees, and the stones, 
and customs and laws, and all sorts of men, hoping to 
find out something to a certainty ; then I hold that a 
man, knowing something, will never be content with- 
out knowing more, and that sets him on the road to be, 
after a while, master of the universe. Then, becoming 
master of truth, he is no longer slave, and so he is free. 
Now this, O Buddha! and O Confucius! seems to me 
clear, that to know alone will save a man." 

Confucius, with the elegance of an orator and a man 
of the world, said: " Now, having heard the views of 
both my wise masters, gracious lords of wisdom, 1 
nevertheless differ from you both. In my opinion sal- 
vation is neither by praying and meditating, nor by 
knowing, but by doing. Do not ask of me what mys- 
tery have you solved, but what have you accomplished. 
For the real salvation after all is to enable the people 
to earn food enough; not to teach them how to go 
without food. The head cannot laugh at the stomach, 
but the stomach can laugh at the head. I would teach 
all men to labor and to love labor, to be honest in the 
use of what they get by labor, to be patient, enduring, 
self-contained. In this way they shall conquer the 
earth, the rivers, and the air, and the soil shall pay 
tribute and men shall live happily, having abundance ; 
religion I would not teach them, but morals. Having 



84 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

given the gods a share, I would let them alone, giving 
them no farther concern; for of this I am fully con- 
vinced, that prayer is but a waste of time. One may 
grow a cup of rice before he can pray one grain of it 
into his bowl. My ideal is the nation where all men 
do their duty, from prince to the humblest of the poor. 
Nature is our mother; all we have to do is to find her 
bosom and drink the milk she furnishes. Where pray- 
ing abounds, idleness and poverty abound; 'when a 
man ploughs not, some one in consequence suffers 
hunger, when a woman weaves not, some one is cold.' 
The sweetest of all music is the whirr of the shuttle, 
for it sings, 'plenty for the poor.' There are four 
things that I believe in, scholarship, morality, indus- 
try, truthfulness. The doings of heaven do not con- 
cern me. The corner of all virtue is 'not to do to 
others as you would not wish them to do to you.' 
You, Buddha, strive to find the gods; Socrates tries to 
find himself; I would seek to find my neighbor. The 
noblest reverence is not that which is shown to unseen 
beings, but to our fathers, to the old people. Neither, 
O Socrates! do I see that knowledge always helps a 
man to true wisdom, for the learned often make fools 
of themselves. Let us rather bend all our energies to 
teach men to do right things at right times, and to 
make this earth a place of -abundance." 

"But," said Buddha, "this earth is a delusion; it 
involves a snare to the soul ; who loves the world loves 
a sinful thing; life cannot be without pain, therefore 
it is evil • it is to be endured only as the will of the 
gods." 

Confucius answered, "That is the very question for 
us as wise men to settle." 

Socrates added: "To despair beforehand is folly. 
Whoso begins with distrusting the works of the gods 
cannot have true faith in the gods." 

So these great men presented each his own theory 



THE TRUE LIFE. 85 

of salvation; each one saw the earth to be not what it 
ought to be, and sought for a remedy. Socrates saw 
how men make fools of themselves; Confucius saw 
how men are lazy and wasteful ; and Buddha saw how 
they are cruel and unjust. 

Very curiously these three men, born about the 
same time 2300 years ago, represent the only three 
plans ever yet devised for saving humanity ; the pray- 
ing or religious method; the investigating or school 
method ; the working or moral method ; and in one way 
or another, and after one or the other of these men, all 
have followed. All the world has been busy on one or 
the other of these plans. Buddha or the religious man 
has unquestionably had the most influence and fol- 
lowers, I do not know why, only that mystery has 
great power over human nature. Of one thing we are 
conscious, that there is more of the unseen about us 
than the seen, and we are desirous of looking into the 
God realm. Socrates has had also his vast power, for 
he is justly considered the father of philosophy. The 
schools of to-day, that wield such paramount influence, 
are the consequence of the Socratic theory of salvation. 

Christianity was born more directly of Buddhism, 
and so far it has controlled the ages, it has made pray- 
ing and fasting predominant, its hope is in another 
life, not in this. 

The reformation of Luther was caused, as you know, 
by a revival of scholarship in Europe . That was when 
the Socratic method came in ; then schools and univer- 
sities began to multiply, and reason dethroned cred- 
ulity. For four hundred years the passion has been 
to know. Whatever men said in the churches, practi- 
cally they said in their lives that the salvation of 
society depended on schools. Education* has been for 
so long the sheet anchor of civilization. 

But to-day the theory which is becoming supreme is 
neither that of prayer nor of study, but that of work. 



86 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

Curiously enough Confucianism is coming to the front. 
The salvation of morals, of honest deeds, of justice and 
industry is to have its day. Shall we pray no more ? 
Yes, most certainly. Shall we give up study? We 
shall only study the more ; but our praying will become 
an uplook and an onlook of one who trusts in the 
victory of right doing; and our study will have for its 
end not to enable us to teach the theology of prayer, 
but to lend a hand in the skilled toil that blesses the 
world and bars out misery. 

With the salvation by right doing comes to the front 
the toiler; this is the dawn of the laboring man's era. 
With it comes less of faith in prayer, more of rational- 
ism, less of priestly influence, less of the power of 
teachers and philosophies, more confidence in doing 
what our hands find to do. 

I told you I would try and illustrate what I want- 
ed to say about life by a picture, and I think you 
understand me. It is this: No one man nor one 
age, nor one race finds out the whole; and it is 
only by bringing together the ideas of different ages 
and races that we get a complete view of right living. 
Here we see life looked at from three standpoints ; 
Buddha shows us what it is to live for the glory of 
God, Socrates what it is to live for the glory of truth, 
Confucius what it is to live for the glory of humanity. 
Are these not all one-sided and partial views? Is not 
the real man made only by uniting the three methods? 
We cannot get at certain power without meditation on 
the Infinite and ideal. Now Buddha is right, though 
right only in part; for one must strive to get away 
from sensualism and so above a sense life ; and Socrates 
is right, though right only in part, for one must 
know that which is outside of him and the relation 
he bears to the universe ; and Confucius is right, but 
right only in part, for one must know how to calmly 
do his duty. But Buddhism alone leads to self- 



THE TRUE LIFE. 87 

degradation, to scorn for reason, to abominable waste of 
time, and would, if it had complete and sole sway, turn 
men into beasts and the world into a desert; celibacy is 
better than marriage ; the family is a sin, life is an evil. 
Give the Socrates idea sole sway, and art and science 
will bow down to sensuality, morals would die out 
and license destroy liberty. Confucianism alone 
reduces society to the level of machinery; each one 
plays his part as a wheel, a belt or a cog, and is 
satisfied. 

The three ideas united (1) Aspiration, hoping, 
yearning, praying, seeing the divine, looking gods 
in the face; (2) Studying, looking under and 
questioning all things, coveting wisdom, worship- 
ing reason, having a passion for knowing; (3) Hon- 
oring humanity, doing for others, obeying law, regu- 
lating yourself for the general good; these three 
things make a true life. Here then is the real 
trinity — aspiration, study, work; and you cannot 
afford to believe in any other. Our age is a one-sided 
age, our religion has too much of the devotee in it, it 
needs more of the study and work ; and no one needs 
to know this more than radicals. 

You say the duty of the preacher is to make you 
feel. No, it is not. It is to make you careful students 
and workers; he has no other general duty whatever, 
for if he should make you feel wrongly, you will act 
unwisely; on the contrary, if you think wisely and 
carefully you will be sure to feel all that you need to 
feel. Feeling is evanescent when its impulse comes 
from another, but if it rises out of your own calm 
convictions it is a permanent affair. There is a serious 
and dangerous mistake in this matter; if you will not 
drill your minds to careful work, you can never be 
taught to feel rightly. I do not know any trouble 
with reform but this, at least none so serious. The 
reformer in nine cases out of ten has nothing in stock 



88 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

but a lot of feelings ; when he feels he acts, but when 
he does not feel he will not act. You cannot count 
him to be true to any line of conduct because he does 
not certainly know what line to follow. Then it is the 
duty of the preacher to show him the line ? Not a bit 
of it. It is the preacher's business to show him how 
to go to work and find the line for himself. I under- 
stand that it is no policy for those whose living 
depends on controlling the people's feelings, to shift 
the responsibility on to the people themselves. But if 
we are ever to get rid of craft in the priest and 
credulity in the people, of religious selfishness and 
falsities, we must teach the people to rely on nothing 
but hard study and sincere doing. Those who give it 
up are not reformers, they are humbugs and hum- 
bugged; they are out of one net only to be caught 
in another; escaping orthodoxy, they become bigoted 
and silly in some other direction. You spend all your 
time in getting money, and then take a dose of feel- 
ing, and it will leave you at the end a being who does 
not know himself. 

But you say you were not trained to study. Then 
if you cannot study stop believing. But those who 
study least come to me with the most terribly strong 
feelings and theories; they are trained to feel and 
not to work. 

I go into the churches and I am never taught any- 
thing; I am only told how to feel in order to be saved. 
It would be considered a sin on God's day to give me 
a lesson on the structure of my brain or lungs, and 
how to live healthily and think clearly ; and as for do- 
ing, it would be criminal inside a church to show 
me how to make two blades of grass grow where only 
one grew before, or how to raise more corn and so help 
feed the hungry children of the world. 

And remember this, no possible phase of liberalism 
is safe or valuable that does nothing more than indi- 



THE DOIXG CREED. 89 

vidualize the person who adopts it; this is to throw a 
man off from society as a scrap is thrown off a wheel 
by its rapid revolution. I am confident of two things, 
(1) That there is a need of more individuality and 
independence. But (2) that really independent indi- 
viduals are better able than any others to co-operate 
for good ends. There is a vast deal of individualism 
that leads only to isolation ; it is selfish and envious. 
Free individuals have a free power to work co-ordi- 
nately that others do not possess. I mean this, that 
slavish minds are to be set in place where the teachers 
want them or as they term it, where God wants them ; 
but individualized people can place themselves where 
they know they are needed by society. 



THE DOING CEEED. 



To visit the fatherless and the widow, and to keep himself 
unspotted from the world. 

I have a good friend, a busy-body, that cannot let 
alone any sick person, and who meddles with the poor 
people's larders for a mile around. He has a kind of 
way of churning sunshine in dismal places, and mak- 
ing your heart grow warm. He is a very good man in 
his way, and has morality of the highest type. I do 
not know that it has ever been impeached. He is quick 
to quarrel, but always in behalf of the oppressed. The 
bad hate him and the good love him; you would say 
that if you must have a heaven made up of human 
beings, you could think of no better sort of saints to 
live with forever than such as he. Is there any noble 
and manly deed or thought? he esteems it; anything 
base? he despises it. As a friend, I know he will not 
desert you in a trial; and that he always shares his 
joys with others. If I were to picture an ideal I could 
scarcely conceive any more perfect than this one fur- 



90 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

nished to hand. It is impossible to meet him without 
being the better for it. There is an atmosphere about 
him that gives health to the soul. In fact, I love him 
like a brother. 

Yet I am a good deal concerned about this man's 
future salvation. Every effort to induce him to join a 
church has failed. I know that he does not believe in 
the ordinary Christian doctrine. He has doubts about 
the fundamentals of orthodoxy. He is at least a 
skeptic in reference to the most sacred views of the 
church. I have heard him say that he did not concern 
himself about the Trinity, or indeed the nature of God 
at all; and that there could be no doctrine more offen- 
sive that that involved in an expiatory death. 

Properly classified, he would be considered as a 
moral man, and not religious, By the church standard, 
he makes a capital man for this earth ; but by the same 
standard, God will reject him from heaven. He is 
very valuable to help pay church debts and support a 
minister, but the brethren will not eat the holy supper 
with him. Morality, says the preacher, is damnable; 
there is no salvation but in the blood of Christ. But 
this blood my friend will have none of. "I will not 
sail under false colors." "If I can have no righteous- 
ness of my own, I will not have that of Jesus attributed 
to me. No tricks of salvation," he says. 

I have consulted with many good Christians about 
this case, and they give me little comfort. "Has he 
been converted?" I am afraid not. "Does he believe 
in the Atonement?" I think not. "Does he hold to the 
divinity of Jesus?" I am sure not. "Then he rejects 
the offer of salvation, and the consequences are upon 
his own head." But what if he be saved now? I urge. 
"He cannot be saved except he believe and be baptized." 
Still, if to be saved be to have every moral power in 
action, every faculty of body and mind enlisted for 
righteousness, this man is now saved, and it would be 



THE DOING CREEP. 91 

hard work to damn him. I cannot see why God 
should try to do it. He would be an honor to any 
heaven. If such as he are to be left out, it will be 
difficult to make up Paradise on any plan. 

I have asked a clerical brother what will be done 
about this case. He is pastor of a large city church, 
and thinks he knows a few such cases in his pews. 
But, by his own account, he has on his church rolls a 
great many very different men. I ask him if it be 
these latter to whom he often refers as saints; and is 
it such as my friend whom he calls sinners. My cleri- 
cal brother consistently replies: "He that believeth 
and is baptized shall be saved; he that believeth not 
shall be damned." What, then, must be done with 
Emerson, the high soul; Whittier, whose song is 
angels' love in human speech; with Longfellow, than 
whom " the icicle carved by the frost and hung on 
Dian's temple" is no more pure? I do not like to 
give you the answer which I have got to this question. 

So you see that by the current theory of salvation, 
there is no hope for my friend. The scheme is cast 
iron? and demands absolute faith. Out of it there is 
only judgment. His life is very lovely and very 
unselfish; but he unfortunately sinned in Adam, and 
his pre-natal record is a bad one. Since birth, how- 
ever, his record is unusually good. 

He is of that stubborn texture that is quite uncon- 
vertible; so that, if saved at all, it must be out of 
Christ. He constantly quotes me the following lines: 

" I deem his faith the best 

Who daily puts it into loving deeds, 
Done for the poor, the sorrowing and the oppressed. 
For theso are more than creeds, 
And though a blinded reason oft may err, 
The heart that loves is faith's interpreter. 
" The schoolman's subtle skill 

Wearies itself with vain philosophies, 
That leave the world to grope in darkness still, 
Haply from lies to lies. 



92 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

But whoso doeth good with heart and might 
Dwells evermore within the light. 

" One hand outstretched to man 

In helpfulness, the other clings to God, 
And thus upheld he walks through time's brief span, 
In ways that Jesus trod. 
Taught by his spirit, and sustained and led, 
That life like his by love is perfected." 

"There is," says he, "a creed of words, and there is r 
creed of deeds ;" and then he quotes from the book of 
the nations, that "actions speak louder than words." 
Men come to us saying, "Do you believe?" But Jesus 
came with this question: "Wilt thou?" And then 
my friend urges most persistently, that he is a Christ- 
ian, a follower of Jesus. "You shall not cast me out," 
he says. "I do not know a single creed question pro- 
pounded by Jesus that I cannot subscribe to. Look 
through the gospels," he says, "and find me a word that 
I will deny. There is the 'Love God with all your 
heart.' I subscribe to that. The affection of a loyal 
son is my joyful tribute to God." But mark you, there 
is nothing said about the atonement here. Love is a 
saving principle, at least that kind of love intended by 
Jesus. It is given as a simple law of nature that a 
man shall love his father. And we are assured by the 
same teacher, that the father as naturally loves his son, 
even a prodigal son. There is heredity that runs 
back of Adam even; we inherit a good deal from God 
himself. Affection runs in the blood as far back as 
our divine parent. 

The doing creed involves also love of neighbor. It 
is possible to get a stout creed of belief confounded 
with a very selfish life. But the doing creed never 
built an inquisition ; never kindled an auto-da-fe; never 
hated a soul for its theories. It has no martyrs. The 
only reasonable view of Jesus' death is a very human 
desire on the part of the priests to stop bad believing, 
although it ended a life eminent for noble achievement. 



THE DOING CREED. 93 

When Jesus was questioned as to his nature he did 
not begin with "Go tell John I believe," but "Go tell 
John," he says, "what ye see and hear. The deaf 
hear, the blind see, the lame walk, the gospel is 
preached to the poor. Whosoever giveth a cup of 
cold water shall get his reward." The sum of all pos- 
sible orders of God is love God and love your neighbor. 

The believing creed has tried for 1800 years to ob- 
tain uniformity and unity; the result having been only 
to divide and subdivide. But men have never yet di- 
vided on the doing creed. The more it is preached 
and practiced the more closely men are bound together. 

A good friend said to me the other day: 
"Well, what do you people up there believe any- 
way." And I said "We believe in doing right." 
"In doing right; is that all?" "Why, no; we believe 
good things about our neighbors." "No, no; but what 
do you believe?" "We believe in honesty, and sincer- 
ity, and truth and justice." "You don't understand," 
she urged. "I want to know what you believe." "We 
believe in letting every one think for himself, and be 
himself, and we hold it a sin to make men avow uni- 
formity of belief." "Then you don't believe anything, 
or else you are trying to dodge me. I want to know 
what you believe about Jesus, you know, and immor- 
tality, future punishment and such things." "Bless 
me, madam, we don't think a great deal about those 
things. But tell me, my friend, I said, what you think 
about them?" "Why, I think, I think they are true." 
"Why?" "Why, because the church does." "Wont 
you tell me which one in your church you would select 
as being most likely to know about these things. I 
am anxious to find some one who can settle all of these 
puzzles." "Oh, I don't mean my church, but the 
church — everywhere and always, you know. They all 
believe in Jesus, and heaven and such things — don't 
you?" "Madam," I said, "a great many people believe 



94 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

Buddha to have been God ; a great many people be- 
lieve Mohammed to have been the prophet of God; a 
great many believe Jesus to have been God. I do not 
wish to quarrel with so many people. I think they are 
not far from equally right." 

Will it be heretical if I say that Jesus' life was a 
constant protest in favor of the doing creed. He went 
about doing good. He gave a noble interpretation 
to life; its object was to do well by others. The 
charm of his career is that it is a pathetic story of 
enduring for others. His soul was so sympathetic 
that the most ordinary intercourse with him was 
healing. His atmosphere was a tonic. Do you know 
that some people can kill us by this very contact? 
They are so murderously mean that they infect us 
Selfishness creates an atmosphere — selfishness as lust, 
selfishness as drunkenness, selfishness as gluttony, sel- 
fishness as greed. The secret of good living is to keep 
away from such people; unless we can live down this 
influence with a weightier individuality of our own. 
Others are a blessing by their presence. Their atmos- 
phere quickens honor, and an impulse to noble work. 
Socrates observed this in his day, and he said: "Flee 
from one whose unspoken influence is toward gross- 
ness." There is no lesson more important than this; 
learn to know who is giving your soul bad atmosphere 
to breathe. 

Now Jesus, as I see, healed those who touched him. 
Every one was better for having looked at him. His 
strength went out always as a blessing. We can find 
such to a degree always. But those of sure soul sym- 
pathy must be conservative of their power. 

Now I do not mean to draw an invidious comparison, 
and say that the great church of orthodoxy is not a 
doing church. I am not one of those who despise even 
foolish efforts put forth with honest intentions. I do 
not look on the vast struggle to convert the world to 



THE DOING CKEED. 95 

New England versions of Calvinism as lacking in the 
element of piety. It is the fact that the church has 
worked, that has saved it, and that has unfortunately 
with it saved a deal of had rubbish. What I would 
complain of is this, that the church denies the substan- 
tial value of works unless supplemented with certain 
theories and convictions. Unless we believe in the 
Atonement, in the Trinity, we are hopelessly lost what- 
ever be our life. It is not the doing that pleases God. 
We were saved or lost by God's will before we began 
to do. When I hear men siDg: 

"Weary, working, burdened one 

Wherefore toil you so? 
Cease! Your doing all was done 

Long, long ago. 

'"Still to Jesus' work you cling, 

By a simple faith; 
Doing is a deadly thing; 

Doing ends in death." 

I say when I hear this my soul rises in rebellion. "My 
father worketh hitherto, and I work," says Jesus. 
Every good soul says the same. It is doing — pure do- 
ing, that makes us, that saves us, that glorifies us, that 
ennobles us, and makes us like God. This perversion 
of life, from grand doing to abject believing, from work- 
ing as an end to seeking a final rest, must be got rid of ; 
and I preach as much for free thinkers as for fettered 
thinkers ; for I find that one of the last things men are 
willing to be converted from, is a hope of final shif tless- 
ness. They are working along, just living, intellectu- 
ally, morally and physically; expecting to get rid, at 
death, of the necessity of doing. Hell they sneer at, 
Trinities, atonements, they reject, but heaven! Ah, 
that lovely idea of getting through with doing is too 
good to be lost. 

Were I to write a creed that I thought fitted to all 
lives, all worlds, all times and eternity, I would write: 



96 LIBEETY AND LIFE. 

(1) I believe I am organized to work. 

(2) I believe my glory is to work well what my 
hands and heart find to do. 

(3) I believe progress consists in an increased abil- 
ity to achieve. 

(4) Salvation is preservation from uselessness. 

( 5 ) Heaven is working with God in all goodly ways 
in doing good. 

(6) God is the working force of the universe. Man 
is a factor of God. 

(7) Damnation is loss of power to do. 

There is not an idle star; there is not an idle atom. 
God pulsates through us, as we are capable of friction- 
less activity. 

Luther, learned among the mottoes of antiquity that 

seemed best suited to tell his soul's deepest thought, 

chose as the one combination of cabalistic signs, that 

told most compactly what all his life meant, 

"Laborare est orare," 
Work is worship. 

You may not need it as he did on a seal with which 
to stamp your correspondence; you do need it graven 
on your soul to stamp your life with. Work is worship. 
Labor is love. Toil is Godly. To work for the right 
in the right is righteous. Your father worketh hith- 
erto; will you work? 

I can pray for a finer organism to work with, for 
fewer weak shafts and rotten belts and loose valves in 
my moral machinery, but I cannot pray for a time when 
the clatter of the universe, like one vast factory of 
looms, shall leave me like a useless spinning wheel in 
the garret of God's mansion. 

I have long meditated on the term "a higher Chris- 
tian life." I know no phrase that has had so much 
charm for me. The higher religious life. What is it ? 
I have been led to suppose it to be one of devotion 
and prayer, of earnest longings for saintliness and dread 



THE KEYS. 9*7 

of vice. I have come to see that what we need is not 
enthusiasm for religion or for Christ, — but a calm ap- 
plication to duty. 

The pearl that is found within the shell of life is 
duty, — what we have donfe with our honest heart for 
the help of our fellows and ourselves. 



THE KEYS. 



It is one of the strangest things, my friends, that 
we find everywhere men who cannot give us or take 
from us an ounce of good soil, but who claim to be 
able to let us in or to lock us out of eternal paradise. 
The Egyptians said you cannot go to eternal peace un- 
less your heart is embalmed in your mummy. Let 
that be stolen or lost, and your soul will wander for- 
ever in the shades. The Greeks said if you do not 
have at least three handsful of soil flung on your 
corpse you cannot be anything but a restless, joyless 
shade in Tartarus. I have in my hand a few bits of 
paper which the Chinese burn at the death of a man, 
for him to use in buying his right of way of the 
devils. It is called "cash for hell." Some of it is 
worth much more than the rest , and is for the richer 
sort of dead. The priests sell it for a revenue, 

I find it difficult to get away from this proffer of 
paradise for a price. Some one is always at my elbow 
who has the keys of heaven. 

There are thousands who would not die without bap- 
tism. A few years ago I was summoned in haste to 
the house of a doctor of divinity, to baptize a dying 
child. The house was in terrible alarm lest I should 
not reach them in time. They had waited as long as 
they dared for the grandfather, but he not arriving, I 
had been bidden in haste. I sprinkled a few drops 



98 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

of water on the babe in the name of the Trinity. 

Thousands more look on it as the most dread of all 
calamities to die unshrived by the priest. The holy 
oil and the priestly pardon are the key to eternal bliss. 

The two most startling passages in the New Testa- 
ment are these: " Thou art Peter, that is, a rock; and 
on this rock I will build my Church, and I will give 
unto thee the keys of the kingdom of Heaven; and 
whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in 
Heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth 
shall be loosed in Heaven." And this: "All manner 
of sin shall be forgiven unto men, but the blasphemy 
against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto 
men ; whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it 
shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world nor in 
the world to come." By the authority of these passages 
we have a vast Church organization that binds for hell 
men who, with noble lives, yet fail to believe in the 
decrees of that Church. Others are forwarded to 
Paradise on the score of a confession of faith or a con- 
version. The Church has the keys. A man sat beside 
me one day in a street car, and in the course of conver- 
sation he found me out to be a heretic as to the lead- 
ing doctrines of the evangelical faith. He was 
astounded and indignant, and denounced me to eternal 
perdition. I told him I trusted that He who gave me 
this lovable life would also give me His love in the 
life beyond. But he said: "Jesus gave to us the keys, 
and by all the laws and theories of the Church you 
cannot be saved. There is no other name under Heaven 
among men whereby ye can be saved except that of 
Jesus of Nazareth." "Would you," I asked him, "if 
you alone could decide, would you turn the key against 
me?" "I would," he replied. I found afterward that 
he was the largest importer of whiskies in St. Louis, 
and not wholly incapable of pronouncing judgment on 
the quality of his wares. The poor man is now dead. 



THE KEYS. 99 

I wonder if he has taken the key with him and will 
watch for my coming. 

Strange, is it not? The dictum of the Church is 
such as to shut the door in the face of Phoebe and 
Alice Cary, Charles Sumner, Theodore Parker; and 
yet unlock it for those against whom we turn the locks 
in our poor paradises called homes. 

Placards are bulletined defining for us the unpar- 
donable sin; we were told last Sunday at the door of 
the hall by some of the keyholders of ITtica that who- 
ever says Jesus did his miracles by the power of Beel- 
zebub commits the unpardonable sin and cannot be 
forgiven. I hope if anybody wants to say anything 
of that sort they will heed the warning. Beelzebub 
sounds bad any way, and may be as powerful a word 
as Abracadabra, with which the magicians used to open 
and shut the caves of treasure. 

I am myself more afraid of a lie than of any such 
incantation. I* read from Rev. Dr. Talmage that in 
New Brunswick, N. J., a man on a railroad track 
uttered an oath; a train came along and struck him 
dead. The physicians examined the body and found 
hardly a bruise, except that the tongue was cut out. 
No mystery at all, says the reverend key holder. The 
man cursed God and had his tongue cut out for it. 
He does not say what purpose the train served. Did 
it run over the man's tongue? For my part, I would 
rather say Jesus was helped by Beelzebub than to tell 
such lies. I think such men do their miracles by the 
power of Beelzebub. There, now, turn the keys if 
you will. 

A few years ago a teacher in college was taken to his 
home in a condition bordering on insanity. He be- 
lieved that he had sinned against the Holy Ghost, and 
was therefore necessarily damned. There was, he said, 
no forgiveness for that sin, according to the Bible; 
and he was therefore hopeless. The college had just 



100 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

been driven through a red-hot revival, a good deal as 
children used to be driven through the tire in honor 
of Moloch. This tutor had been very zealous, but at 
the same time very sad, under the frown of the Calvi- 
nism in which he believed. The strain upon his nerves 
turned the possibility of sinning against the Holy 
Ghost into a certainty — and he w r as wrecked. 

Let me stop a moment to show you the picture which 
orthodoxy has painted as one of its chief works. Not 
satisfied with its picture of the Father God, the great 
implacable, whose vengeance was eternally doomed to 
fall on unborn millions, it went on to picture Jesus. 
Unable to wholly brutalize his human nature without 
making the world cry out, that no such being was ever 
begotten of man ; compelled to allow him to be merciful 
and pitiful while on earth, it made of him a bitter, 
resentful judge after this life. It seated him on a 
throne with twelve other junior potentates on twelve 
other thrones, making our eternity to depend on our 
belief in his divinity, and harshly forbidding all 
change of opinion after death. I say, not satisfied 
with those detestable daubs of a damnable sort, ortho- 
doxy forthwith took its brush and dashed off another 
God more terrible than either. A God whom if you 
should speak against, even in ignorance or in passion, 
there should be no forgiveness to the end of eternity. 
The great Implacable of the Trinity! Not one word, 
not a thought against this God, my poor fellow! or you 
are outside of hope forever. 

What a trio! (1) The God who made us out of 
nothing and graciously endowed us with immortality 
in hell. (2) The God who died to save the elect, but, 
Lord Jeffreys of eternity, holds his assize to condemn 
and denounce till the last poor wretch has left the 
cursed world. (3) The God whose icy soul never 
warms toward the poor creature that has insulted him. 
The great touch me not of the skies — a ghost indeed! 
without one drop of warm blood in his veins. 



THE KEYS. 101 

Trinity! It would take a thousand such Gods to 
make a decent work of creation. Let us have one or 
none, and that one a good one. 

Am I an atheist because I abhor this triad of infinite 
conceit, infinite anger, infinite injustice? 

Yet I can understand that there is such a thing as 
sin against a Holy Spirit that is in its nature unpar- 
donable — not that it consigns a man to a hell, but it is 
a sin you can't rub out. It will show on the 
character forever. And for my part, I conceive it to 
be vastly worse to be forever foul than to be forever 
the object of the hate of an angry God. What folly is 
this terrible hullaballoo that is kept up by the whole 
human race for fear of being hurt by a God. Think of 
the amount of anxiety, terror, weeping and praying 
going on to-day. The world down on its knees howl- 
ing for pity. Not much said about the misery of being 
forever spotted, defiled, scarred with sin. It is mostly 
to escape torment and secure bliss. 

What now really is the Holy Spirit? Evidently in 
the meaning of Jesus, he is the Eternal Spirit of the 
universe. You cannot get from Jesus' words the least 
intimation that he considered God in two persons. The 
Holy Spirit was God, and the Father w'as God, and 
everybody in proportion to his goodness was one with 
God. 

If God be a Spirit — if we are to conceive no physi- 
cal God, nor even make an image of one, then why go 
on to say that the Holy Spirit means not God, but a 
third person of God? You could not easily get a 
better* definition of the eternal power that makes for 
right than the Spirit of Holiness, or Holy Spirit. 
There cannot be two Eternals or two Infinite Spirits; 
we deal falsely with reason when we set aside the 
Father as one, Jesus as two, and then declare that 
there is a third person infinite, who is peculiarly the 
Spirit. How can he be any more absolutely Spirit 



102 LIBERTY AND LIFE, 

than God who is absolute Spirit? Modern thought 
has been brought into a useless confusion about a 
triplex Godhead. One had quite as well be an atheist 
as a Christian polytheist. Let us understand as the 
corner stone of our theology that God is one, and that 
He is the only one, and that He is the Spirit of the 
Universe, the intelligence in nature, the moral life in 
the tide of time. No Jesus has any right to be called 
Infinite, Eternal or Absolute. Nor is there any Spirit 
but the One Soul ; and in Him is your life and mine. 

Now, the point to determine is , what is your relation 
to this God Spirit? What are your duties, your needs, 
and the consequences of the freedom we exercise 
toward Him ? All true Spirit life is of God ; so that 
if true to yourself you are true to God. 

It follows, that to sin against yourself is to sin 
against God. The end of reason is to discover the 
laws of right as applied to ourselves. The sum of 
piety is to obey those laws, 

To sin against the Holy Spirit is to sin against the 
spirit of holiness, and it is unpardonable only in this 
sense, that as I destroy myself and weaken my soul 
power, I am permanently of less value to myself and 
to God. « 

You must understand that Jesus had a notion of 
saving a soul very different from that held by your 
modern Christian. He never spoke of saving a soul 
from hell. A soul was lost in his estimation when it 
lost its power to see the good, to will the good, and act 
the good. 

But to come back to the keys. A couple of gentle- 
men sat behind me last Monday in che cars. One of 
them said: " Where is John now?" " Oh," the other 
replied, "he is in New York serving the Lord. You 
know he liked to serve Him conspicuously. But then 
he is a good fellow? and when John dies, will go to 
heaven, no mistake." And so wherever I go I hear 



THE KEYS. 103 

the click, click of the key, and I wonder at this cool 
way of farming out eternity. 

I ask, then, how is it I may be sure to have the doors 
opened ? 

The answer is: "Believe and be baptized and thou 
shalt be saved; believe not and thou shalt be damned." 
But believe what? In the Evangelical creed — that is, 
the Trinity, inspiration of the Bible, the sacraments 
and the atonement. Where did you get the creed? 
Out of the Bible. Where did you get the Bible? 
God wrote it. Then God must have the keys. You 
cannot even write to Timothy asking him to bring 
your cloak from Troas without God's help, and yet you 
profess to have the keys of eternity entrusted to you. 
You do not even know where hell and heaven are, and 
yet you hold the keys that lock them. 

But whom have you got in heaven? Why, God and 
the angels, and all the pious dead. And if you do 
not die in the faith you can never see God. Are you 
sure, my friend, that you can lock God up? Perhaps 
you can lock me out, can you lock Him in? He was 
out this morning by the bedside of the sick, I know. 
He was out last night with the victims of man's inhu- 
manity. Whose rain and sunshine is it that visits all 
the fields alike, and takes no note of creed or crook? 
I look up into the face of those spring mornings that 
touch me with the incense of coming flowers, and I 
say: 

" My Father, in thy love I rest, 
By thy peace I am possessed, 
Hold me to thy gentle breast, 
Ever working, ever blest." 

When the sun rises with healing in his wings, no 
one can lock God in. When I sit in my home, with 
the birds in the nest and the mother bird growing 
wise with the loveliness of her divine commission, 
you cannot lock God out, because I deny your creed. 



104 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

You have no key to the golden year that is now 
opening its arms wider every morning, full of Junes 
and Augusts for the believer and unbeliever alike. 
You have no key to Autumn's richness and October's 
glory. 

My poor key-holder, go in and turn the key if you 
want to. I cannot lock myself in, away from the poor, 
cursed, cursing wretches. Your heavens are all 
un suited to me. Let me stay out, for you and I can- 
not agree. Why should we try to live in one 
house? 

I pick up a touching picture of this sort, recently 
presented to a large congregation of admiring believers. 

" God grant," cried the preacher, " that in the final 
moment you may have the bright vision which came 
to a dying child, who said: 'Mother, what is that 
beautiful land out yonder beyond the mountains?' 
' There are no mountains near us, my child.' ' Oh, 
yes,' said the little one; 'don't you seethe beautiful 
land all white beyond the mountains ? ' ' My dear,' 
said the mother, ' that must be heaven that you see.' 
'I see,' cried the girl, 'I see a bright one coming to 
carry me over the water to the beautiful land over 
the mountains.' " 

This, to me, is a very practical question, how these 
people, not always the most educated or the most able 
thinkers, come to know about the next world so 
definitely. Is it certainly a sin for me to doubt 
whether they know anything at all about it ? A circu- 
lar comes to me offering special rates of insurance in 
a minister's evangelical insurance club. I am sus- 
picious that those five or six ministers will prove poor 
business hands, and I shall lose my money if they 
get it, as they will not. The recent collapse on the 
Paris Bourse is based on the performances of a bank 
established as a specially religious affair. It was the 
pet of the Pope, of Count Chambord, and all peculi- 



THE KEYS. 105 

arly pious people. It was anti-Jew, and devotedly 
orthodox. It broke like a wild-cat Indiana bank of 
old times. The manager is arrested for fraud. You 
see religion is no guarantee for anything but religion. 

The religious man cannot guarantee me wealth in 
this life nor mansions in the next. Heaven looks to 
be too much like a business investment; and all my 
warrant is that certain religious fellows have the 
keys. 

Last week a religious paper came in saying: "Who- 
ever subscribes for this paper for a friend will thereby 
save a soul from hell. Solicit your friends for their 
souls' welfare." 

There is your chromo, my friend. 

But there are paradises, there are keys and there 
are St. Peters all about us. My wife, if she will study 
to know my needs, is something more than a house- 
keeper. She carries the keys to half my peace and 
joy. My boys are little chaps to be entrusted with 
such golden keys; but the biggest paradise of all 
is that the babes unlock. 

" What would the world be 

If the children were no more? 
We should dread the desert behind us, 
More than the dark before." 

Last Sunday I left this stand weary and a good deal 
depressed. My nerves were on a sort of Bull Bun 
panic. But I was scarcely off the platform, when 
some of you, whose judgment I specially value, with a 
few golden words turned in the lock of a benign 
good will, flung open paradise to me and gave me 
rest. 

What a wonderful thing it is to live with the power 
of making people happy. A single word, a kind look, 
a little gift, a heart to help. 

In my own soul also may be palaces which I must 
unlock. How little do men know of their capacities 



106 LIBEETY AND LIFE. 

for joy. The keys are study and love. 

The kingdom of God is within you. 

In every man lies the Infinite. His possibilities are 
limitless. Think of the things he may know, of the 
progress he may make in every direction. No one can 
get a good glimpse of his possible achievements and 
joys without looking up for eternal life. The idea of 
immortality is born of despair — despair of doing more 
than to make a beginning in this life. 

For one thing, I above all things love Jesus ; that is, 
his pitifulness; and I cannot think of him as con- 
demning any one to pitiless misery. You give us an 
impossible contrast in Jesus, the dying Saviour, dying 
for me; and Jesus the unpitying judge. I love him 
because he loved others. Out of that thought I am no 
way bound to him. 

Such souls as that do not turn to damning. 

The other day I read this story: The Cyprian, com- 
manded by Capt. Alexander Strachan, left Liverpool 
last October for the Mediterranean Sea. She soon ran 
into a gale, that deepened rapidly into a hurricane. 
On the following day she was driven ashore on the 
coast of Carnarvonshire. There were on board twenty- 
eight persons, including a poor lad who had concealed 
himself, a stowaway. So far this wretched lad had 
not been discovered. Before the ship struck, what 
life-boats were on board were distributed to the crew, 
one being reserved for the Captain. One after another 
the crew had plunged into the boiling surf, and were 
dashed along by it to the shore. The Captain remained 
until the last, and was about to follow their example, 
when his eye fell on the poor stowaway, whose terror 
had driven him from his hiding-place. Captain 
Strachan did not speak a word of anger to the little 
waif, but taking off the life-belt intended for himself, 
he fastened it carefully about the boy and dropped 
him into the sea. He himself followed, but without a 



THE KEYS. 10 Y 

belt. The waif was safely carried to the shore; the 
noble-hearted man perished. 

I don't know what was his creed. I am afraid he 
had none. But I would like to spend eternity in 
such company. He died for another. And so the 
world may be divided into those who are seekers 
after heaven, and those who have found their heaven 
here. Heaven is not in getting away from sin and 
trouble, but in living right in the midst of sin and 
trouble and pain, and trying to alleviate it. 

Heaven material is very abundant in this world, 
and, I am sorry to say, the very same material can 
be made to construct abodes of misery. Home may 
be heaven, or it may be hell. Money, nature, wealth, 
art or friends — you may use them to make God a wel- 
come, or to orphan the soul. 

It is not much of a heaven to have wealth and not 
know how to use it nobly. It will buy heavens, how- 
ever, if generously used. What a pitiful sight is a 
rich man always dreading want! Every day of his 
life seeing the poor-house in the distance. Quite as 
helpless is the effort to get into paradise by getting 
into society on the score of abundance. You squander 
as much in a vain struggle to be recognized as would 
fit up a heaven lined with blessings and cushioned 
with the love of your friends. There is no hell like 
that which is called "first society." You despise it, it 
despises you. You hold yourself to be in it. It leads 
you a fine chase, and then calls you a fool for your 
pains. I do not despise wealth. It is power; it is a 
key to royal pavilions. You can make worlds grand 
with it. Only forget to be selfish. Was not Jesus 
God- like when he said: " He who will give his very life 
for others, thereby gains life." Immortality is living 
in others. What can you think of sweeter than smiles, 
more musical than thanks, more enjoyable than grati- 
tude? I do not mean, try to make people your pen- 



108 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

sioners. Enjoy yourself rather in giving a lift to a 
young soul, and seeing him come out strong where he 
would have been a failure. 

Heaven! I don't know as I want anything, only to 
be able by and by to live in all the good memories I 
can multiply, and then obliterate the evil. Some days 
they come in a crowd — all the dear faces from all 
along the years, and they are around me with their 
old-time fun and joy, their laughing eyes, their plead- 
ing desires for the good; all that I have tried to help; 
and so the years clasp me in a glad embrace, and say 
man's heaven is his memory and his hope. The king- 
dom of God is within you. 

I read of one of the kings of Egypt, that to one 
who praised him, he said: " You call me a God, my 
child; but in this only do I feel God- like, that at 
every moment I try to the utmost to prove myself 
useful to my people. God-like I can never be but by 
producing and doing something noble." 

My friends, will you consider how many paradises 
you can open while you live ? I know you can make 
a great many souls nobler and happier if you will. 

But if you must turn to the future, and try to pro- 
vide for that unexplored realm of existence, what prize 
are you so sure of as the key of an honest purpose 
and a true life? Can you really believe that He 
whose benediction rests upon you here for your 
charity, your honor, your purity, your truth, will have 
for you any other test then? Can you find the key 
to God's love now, be sure the same key will ever 
unlock to you His infinite wealth of paternal bless- 
ing. Can you find a key that opens the door to peace 
and joy, hope and progress, do not doubt that that 
key will fit the door of peace and joy forever. The 
divine artificer will not give to you the key, and then 
change the locks. 

Eternity! Eternity! I stand sometimes on the 



A BUNDLE OF PARADOXES. 109 

edge of time and look out and down into its unf athom- 
ableness; I hear no howl of judgment days resound- 
ing through its depths, no keen voice of the Great 
Divider sundering the noblest ties of time, no grating 
of keys in prison doors. I hear only, I see only 
that I am a child, and that my problem lies in this 
life at my feet, among my neighbors, at my daily 
duties, and I hear Jesus repeat: "The whole law of the 
soul is love God with all your heart, and your neigh- 
bor as you do yourself." 



A BUNDLE OF PAEADOXES. 

Circumstances have the past week driven me to look 
through a few of the popular creeds of Christendom, 
and into a few theological treatises. The peculiar 
tangle everywhere present in these suggested to me 
the topic, " A Bundle of Paradoxes." Talking with a 
very distinguished astronomer about these things, he 
said: "It is not strange that there should be in the 
past a vast amount of blundering, but the wonder is, 
people insist on taking such things for facts now. 
If I find an error in the figures of my predecessors, 
I am permitted to correct the same ; but in theology, 
the chief thing is not to make any corrections at all. 
If Venus makes a transit across the sun, shut your 
eyes every night, lock up your telescope, and don't 
find out anything new. 1 think the reason people 
profess to believe such monstrous paradoxes is the 
desire to hold on to ecclesiastical power." 

But I said: " They prof ess to be open to proof." 
"Oh, very well, but then they believe all the same; 
because faith is above reason ; and the highest proof is 
because so many have believed." And this is my 
first paradox, that reason should be given toman as 



110 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

the final arbiter in all things; but what things are 
contained in a specified book are not to be subject to 
reason ; they are revealed of God. How do we know 
they are revealed ? An appeal is made to our reason, 
to show that they are revealed because of miracles and 
prophecies. But how do we know that the miracles were 
genuine? On testimony. But if we pronounce the 
evidence unsatisfactory and contradictory, we are told 
that these are the mysteries of God, and to be taken on 
faith. So that our first paradox concerns the authority 
at the basis of the whole system. 

The rationalist answers: No book is above reason. 
Whatever reveals is revelation. Reason is the final 
arbiter as to the authority of all facts. Faith is never 
above reason. It is a crime against our intellectual 
and moral natures to credit the incredible. Spiritual 
facts are like all facts, data to work with to reach 
truth. 

Paradox No. 2. — God revealed Himself specifically 
and supernaturally during a period of human history. 
He will, we are told, do so no more ; yet the same or 
greater reasons remain for continual supernatural 
revelation. 

The rationalist answers: God reveals Himself in 
and through the union of matter and mind ; where 
matter is, there must be God; where mind is, there 
must be God. All matter and all mind is a revelation 
of God according to its quality ; there is no super- 
naturalism. 

Paradox No. 3. — God, we are told by the creed, 
created the world to manifest His glory. Manifest it 
to whom ? Evidently to His creatures. Was God not 
glorious before creation? Is He more glorious for the 
admiration of the creatures of His hands ? Why, then, 
did He not so create that all of His creatures should 
be an honor to Him, and recognize His glory ? 

The rationalist answers: All creation is a pro- 



A BUNDLE OF FARADOXES. Ill 

gressive unfolding of the true, beautiful and good. 
There never was a creation, or a time before creation. 
God is the totality of the true, beautiful and good, 
and is no more glorified by us than the sun is honored 
by our looking at it through our smoked glasses. 

Paradox No. 4. — God is the essence of primal 
goodness, out of which all goodness is born. Yet His 
end in creation, we are told, was not goodness, but to 
glorify Himself , so that He recognizes no obligation 
to what He makes. 

The rationalist answers: A moral being is under 
obligation just in proportion to his power and knowl- 
edge; God being power and knowledge absolute, is 
infinitely more responsible to man, to be just and kind 
than a man is to Him. God we are taught to call 
Father. We mean the universe is home. We are 
children; God is the head of the family of all intelli- 
gence; yet Father God, deliberately of his own good 
pleasure, decreed the eternal badness and misery of a 
part of His family. Any other father doing the same 
would be pronounced a villain. Yet God is not only to 
be respected, but to be loved. 

The rationalist adds: The divine and eternal moral 
power in the universe is, and always was, a force to 
save and ennoble every one of us. 

Paradox No. 6. — The creed Fays God in His anger 
doomed all to eternal perdition, and that He is every 
day angry at the sinner. But that Jesus died to save 
a few, and for them he sits in his flesh at God's right 
hand, pleading his promise to spare for the sake of 
the death on the cross; yet we are told God sent Jesus 
to die for this purpose; making God masquerade ; or 
else proving a contradiction in the divine nature. He 
is angry; yet not angry. He will damn; but He will 
save. 

The rationalist answers: The anger and vindictive- 
ness is a fiction of undeveloped moral natures. There 



112 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

is no real difference between Moloch, who demanded 
that children should pass through the fire, and a God 
who elects some children to be saved and leaves the 
rest to go to hell. There is no essential difference 
between the God who requires human sacrifices of 
bodies and one who sacrifices souls. The Christian 
God surpasses all others in malignity and unbending 
wrath. The scheme that ends in hell is the scheme of 
a Supreme Demon. 

Paradox No. 7. — The creeds tell us God forewilled 
the whole future; when did He begin to fore will? 
Was there a time before creation ? What did He will 
then? Did He exercise no will? Or was it a will 
that was exercised on Himself? But if there was no 
matter and no soul, what was there? Could God as a 
creative power ever have been without creative will? 

The rationalist answers: God and nature are one. 
All matter and all soul always existed, and always 
will. 

Paradox No. 8. — We are told God decreed the whole 
future, involving the salvation of some men. 

But the elect would not have been saved nad not 
Jesus interfered and died for them, and pacified 
Deity. But unless the Holy Ghost works on the hearts 
of the elect, they will not accept of Jesus, who alone 
can save them, although decreed to be saved. 

Nor even then can they be saved until they will 
to let the Holy Ghost work in their hearts, to incline 
them to accept Jesus, who will see that the absolute 
decree be indeed a certainty. 

If this reads slightly like the house that Jack built, 
you must not blame the reader. 

The rationalist answers: Salvation is wholly in the 
human will to do the right and obey the true. 

I come now to a second set of paradoxes, which 
concern Jesus. 

1st. — Jesus died for all, and the creed declares that 



A BUNDLE OF PARADOXES. 113 

we are to pray for all. Yet, as the facts are, not one- 
hundredth of men have ever heard of Jesus. As it is 
positively asserted that in this life only is pardon, why 
should we pray for those who evidently will never 
have the least chance for salvation? 

The rationalist answers, it is insufferable conceit for 
you to pray for men a thousand-fold better than your- 
self. And to assert that the divine demand, felt in 
every human heart, to be true, pure and honest, means 
nothing; and when obeyed, goes for nothing; with one 
who seeks for human betterment, is contrary to every 
conviction of human nature. 

Paradox No. 2. — In the contract with Jesus a cer- 
tain inheritance of men was eternally given to him. 
These were granted as a sign of love to him. But if 
he be God, it was only a sign of love of God for him- 
self. Yet after being eternally chosen for Jesus, he 
had to buy them with his blood. But if he be God he 
bought them of himself; yet he forever stands at the 
right hand of God, pleading for the saved. If he be 
God, then God stands at his own right hand. If they 
be saved, why farther plead for them ? 

nationalism answers, that all such complications 
and contradictions of personality and character, are 
puerilities to be classed with tales of magic. 

Paradox No. 3. — Jesus is God, God is Jesus. God 
is unwilling to save us ; Jesus wills to save us, there- 
fore God is set against God. 

Paradox No. 4. — The creed says, Jesus was both God 
and man in one person, and sometimes the divine na- 
ture acted, and sometimes the human. Therefore 
while acting as God, he held the human in absolute 
abeyance and nullity, but when acting as man, did he 
hold his Godhood in nullity ? Who or what was it in 
him over both natures which decided which should act. 
Was it reason? If so, was that reason human or di- 
vine? While acting purely as human, was he not capa- 



114 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

ble of sin ? Was lie any tiling but a man ? What did 
lie do with his Godhead when it was rendered non- 
active. 

These, we are told, are mysteries of Godliness, and 
above reason. 

The rationalist answers, they are either above rea- 
son, or beneath it. 

Paradox No. 4. — We read in Homer, Virgil, and 
many other old authors, that on several occasions 
virgins bore sons to Gods; indeed, nearly all notable 
heroes traced their origin to such a source. In the 
Bible I read that Jesus was born of a virgin and of 
the Holy Ghost or God. The proof is nowhere at- 
tempted in any such asserted case. I am taught to 
believe the one case of Jesus, but to disbelieve all 
others. 

Reason answers, this is the highway to foolishness, 
and such a belief is a finger post. 

Paradox No. 5. — Jesus bears my sins on the cross, 
and atones for them. I also must suffer for the 
same. His righteousness is accounted mine, and I am 
saved by his deeds. 

Rationalism answers, you cannot be pious by proxy. 
Proxies have controlled the destiny of mankind only 
for the worse. Kings have acted by way of proxy for 
a whole people, depriving them of suffrage; priests 
have served as proxy for the conscience of the 
people ; by proxy, babies' bodies are baptized to save 
their souls ; Adam was proxy for all his descendants in 
misery. He ate for us, and therefore we die. A goat 
was sent off into the wilderness bearing the sins of the 
Jews by proxy; Jesus was God's proxy to man; he is 
man's proxy to God. He died for us, and we are good 
by the proxy of trust in him. Your creeds come by 
proxy ; Moses was proxy for all astronomers and geolo- 
gists to expound the world and heavens. Paul was 
proxy for all women to the end of time. Rationalism 



A BUNDLE OF PARADOXES. 115 

declares that salvation demands my own personal atten- 
tion and consists in my personal obedience to the 
right. 

Paradox No. 6. — "Jesus is eternally begotten of 
God." "The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father 
and Son." But Jesus is "begotten of the Holy Spirit," 
who proceeds from himself; whereas he was already 
begotten of the Father from whom also the Holy 
Spirit proceeds. 

Reason leaves this unique problem to be solved by 
inspiration. 

Turn now to a few paradoxes of a third class. 

No. 1. — God is supreme and absolute, but he had 
hardly finished a creation out of nothing, with no hin- 
drances or perplexing antagonisms, before a force broke 
loose among those he had called into existence, and 
wrought immense havoc. It defiled and ruined his 
whole work, and left the Absolute Master to gather up 
a few fragments from the general wreck. From that 
time God deserted the world, pronounced man a rebel; 
and eternally gave up his scheme and his creation as 
ruined. The perfect becomes imperfect. Then here- 
after all is an effort at restoration. Then comes in 
hopelessness ; then a heaven for the restored, and also 
a hell for the refused. Your magnificent creator 
becomes a wrecker gathering a few floats from the 
break-up. 

The schedule of restoration changes to one of sal- 
vation, that to one essentially of damnation. Punish- 
ing and destroying becomes the creator's chief end. 

The chief end of man is to glorify God. 

The chief end of God is to punish man. 

Reason answers: Man is responsible only for his 
own deeds, and not for his forefathers'. Jffe is respon- 
sible only so far as his abilities and advantages reach, 
and neither the world nor the flesh are necessarily temp- 
tations. They are more generally the most positive 



116 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

helps to progress. Man is a creature under a process 
of development. We live not under our best condi- 
tions, but where we can, where the brute in us permits. 
The struggle for existence is an attempt to adapt our- 
selves to necessary surroundings. It makes Esqui- 
maux, Patagonians and Caucasians. It saves the 
fittest as things are, but not fittest ideally. 

Paradox No. 2. — Satan is a conscious moral being, 
capable of moral choice and responsible. Not one 
effort has ever been put forth to save him or turn him to 
rightness. He is the legitimate object of wrath ; God, 
as absolute, might at least end his existence. He does 
not, yet God is wise. He might never have created 
him, foreknowing what he would be. But he did, and 
God is good. 

Rationalism says: Try to convert the devil, if he 
exists. But as a matter of fact Satan is only the result 
of looking in the glass of your own conscience. There 
is no more proof of the existence of a devil, than of the 
existence of the mermaids or witches. 

Paradox No. 3. — Man is to be held absolutely respon- 
sible for his actions and his beliefs; yet his character 
was decreed before the world was made. He sinned 
in Adam 4000 years before he was born. The devil 
was his companion, with full access to him to lead him 
astray in his infancy. The world in which he lives is 
a temptation, so is his body. The scheme of salvation 
only the elect can accept. Three-fourths of men never 
heard of it, yet every man is fully responsible for not 
accepting it. 

Paradox No. 4. — Men are divided into saints and 
sinners ; but all saints are sinners, and all sinners when 
saintly, are yet sinners. 

Reason av^rs that a saint is only an advanced sinner, 
one whose moral choice is instinctively for the good. 
A saint is by no means the one who has united with 
believers and been baptized. 



A BUNDLE OF PARADOXES. 117 

Paradox No. 5, — Miracles were wrought 2000 years 
ago for God's glory. An authenticated miracle now 
would certainly do as much as then to glorify God; 
but it is forbidden us to ask for or believe in any. 

The Church is divided against itself on this point; 
and one party uses against the supposed miracles of 
the other party precisely the same arguments that 
rationalists urge against the miracles of both parties. 

Reason declares that the relation of God to the coin- 
cidences of every day life is purely that of nature. He 
is law, and law is the life of the universe. It is the 
expression and proof of Divinity. But read your 
Thanksgiving Proclamations, and you find even the 
State bidding you render thanks for special provi- 
dences. As if God had been specially benign this 
year or specially pliant to prayer, or peculiarly and 
unusually good natured; and we were to thank Him 
for it. 

Reason says all thiugs work for good at all times to 
men of right mind. 

Paradox No. 6. — We are told that nature was God's 
own work, His will and idea put in shape. Natural 
law is His legislation, yet we are also told of the dark- 
ness of nature and the lost condition of the natural 
man. Tnen must we have a supernatural revelation of 
God to make His natural work good and fit. 

But as far as I can find, it is from Nature we get law, 
beauty, progress, love, truth, father, mother, responsi- 
bility, and God himself. From the supernatural we 
get broken laws, miracles and prophecies; and for 
morals the duty of disobeying father and mother for the 
Kingdom of Heaven's sake; for philosophy that faith 
is above reason; a general subversion of physical, 
moral and mental laws. 

Rationalism answers that in nature is the whole law 
of the Supreme and Infinite good; that the laws of 
nature hold as irresistible ; and no pretended prophet, 



118 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

priest or God can reverse them. He only stands true 
to his own eternal welfare who stands true to the laws 
of every day life. 

Paradox No. 7. — We are told that God planned, in 
absolute wisdom and unlimited power, the universe and 
its inhabitants ; but His plans were upset and a sad 
wreck made of His work; yet we are told that there 
were prophets in Israel who foretold what would take 
place thousands of years in the future. 

Reason asks, if God himself cannot be sure of the 
future, how can a man foretell what will be a cer- 
tainty ? 

Paradox No. 8. — It is declared to be a sin for a non- 
elect person to do a right deed ; but that it is equally a 
sin for him not to do it ; nothing being sinless but what 
is done for God's glory. 

Rationalism declares that right is right and wrong 
is wrong, and that every right deed must honor a good 
God ; but that a selfish God can be honored by neither 
those who serve Him nor those who despise Him. 

Finally a theological paradox involved in all the 
paradoxes enumerated is this: 

The essence of true religion is unselfishness. No 
one can escape the fact that Jesus' Gospel is the law 
of loving others truly, and that it involves human 
equality. 

Yet the creeds unanimously and vociferously point 
to the attainment of Heaven as the supreme end of a 
religious life. 

And this greed for heaven has made Christian his- 
tory a charnel-house of murder and torture. 

Put side by side the following: (1). From the 
Westminster Confession of Faith: "At the day of 
judgment the righteous, being caught up to Christ in 
the clouds, shall be set on His right hand, and there, 
openly acknowledged and acquitted, shall join with 
Him in the judging of reprobate angels and men, and 



A BTJiSrDLE OF PARADOXES. 119 

shall be received into heaven, where they shall be fully 
and forever freed from all" sin and misery, rilled with 
inconceivable joys, made perfectly holy and happy, 
both in body and soul, in the company of innumerable 
saints and angels, but especially in the immediate 
vision and fruition of God the Father, of our Lord 
Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Ghost to all eternity." 
(2). This from Jonathan Edwards on "The torments 
of the wicked no occasion of grief to the saints in 
heaven:" "When the saints in glory shall see the 
doleful state of the damned, how will it heighten their 
sense of the blessedness of their own state ; when they 
shall see the smoke of their torment and hear their 
dolorous cries and shrieks, and consider that they are, 
in the meantime, in the most blissful state, how will 
they rejoice?" "It is now our duty to love all men; 
but this is not the case in the other world." Now read 
church history and see for a certainty that the right- 
eous have not waited altogether for the judgment day 
to increase their joys at the expense of the sinners; 
and you will join with me in saying that so detestable, 
unrighteous and immoral a system of theology never 
existed as this, which overlies and does its best to 
smother the religion of Nature and the religion of 
Jesus. 

I do not fight religion, but the Christian theology; 
that is, a complexity of contradictions ending in the 
ferocious struggle of the elect to be happy at the 
expense of the rest of God's creatures. 

Poor, abhorred reason, "sinful reason," "insufficient 
reason" says that the sum of all religion is "to visit the 
fatherless and the widow in their affliction, and to keep 
yourself unspotted from the world." 

The rationalist says, that which conduces to my 
neighbor's joy alone can give me joy, and that only 
can be salvation which renders the soul pitiful of even 
the most fallen. 



120 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

Poor "despised nature," in its darkness, "fallen 
nature " goes rolling on through its golden seasons, 
working out the freedom and equality, the joy and 
progress of every human being ; it tends for rightness. 
The heavens have not forgotten to declare the glory of 
God, nor has night forgotten to speak wisdom unto 
night. But theology grinds humanity under its wheels, 
points to a vindictive God, announces a great day of 
revenge and constructs a hell of eternal torture. Nature 
smiles, the stars are our friends, the days are treasure- 
houses of delight, the minutes drop down to us from 
the mint of divine love. Time bears ever onward, but 
we have not yet come in sight of any change from the 
parental plan of Providence. Eeason suggests we shall 
not. It leads us to the brink of the grave. We stoop 
and pick up there the most beautiful flowers of tender- 
ness and human love. Saints and sinners alike smooth 
the pillow of the rich and minister to our needs. Their 
tears mingle in the grave. Reason says it will never 
be otherwise, but that humanity will move helpfully 
forward beyond the grave, God inspired, toward a final 
brotherhood of the true, beautiful and good. 

O soft eternal blue! 

Could I your depths look through 

This glorious night; 
Beyond the stars of gold, 
Should I somewhere behold 
An everlasting frown, 
An angry God bent down, 

Mortals to affright? 

What means this earthly sheen, 
These hills and valleys green, 

Filled wth delight? 
Freighted with love each day, 
Smiles joyful on its way; 
Entranced with rest and peace 

Comes on the night. 

Somewhere in ages past, 
In the infinito vast 

Of nothingness, 
Was there a God, alone, 



A SUBSTITUTE FOR ORTHODOXY. 121 

With neither child nor throne, 
Who planned creations round, 
Its glories without bound, 
In selfishness? 

Then willed to mar it all, 
His creatures doomed to fall 

And deemed it well? 
Who coolly did debate, 
Alone deliberate 
Creations without bound, 
Stars by stars unfound, 

And then a hell? 

And with sardonic face 
Call it infinite grace 

To save a few? 
Order that all shall love 
Himself themselves above? 
E'en those who're doomed to burn, 
Whose prayers he wills to spurn, 

Must honors strew? 

O, mild eternal blue! 
I turn again to you, 

Inquiring turn; 
The stars and I grow one, 
Betwixt us smiles the sun; — 
5 Tis here the storms beat down, 
And here, not there, the frown,— 

Here mortals burn. 



A SUBSTITUTE FOB OKTHODOXY. 

I propose to answer the question: "What do theists 
or liberals offer in place of that which they destroy ?" 

(1.) First of all, and most important, what do we 
give in exchange for an "inspired word of God." No 
question at present compares with this; for it is evi- 
dent not only that pronounced rationalists deny super- 
naturalism, but many of the leaders in the Church are 
substantially asserting that all Scriptures are open to 
criticism, and are neither verbally nor plenarily 
inspired. The objection urged by our opponents is 
that we need a standard of authority on all questions 



12 2 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

pertaining to theology ; and f urtliermore that the Bible 
is the chief bulwark against infidelity and atheism and 
license. 

What do we propose in place of a book which has 
so long held the reverential regard of Christendom as 
the literal word of God? I answer: 

(1.) We are not bound to give anything in place of 
the Scriptures, if it be fairly proved that they are only 
human. I have before me an article written last week 
by a prominent Doctor of Divinity in the orthodox 
Church, carefully demonstrating that the five books of 
Moses were written hundreds of years after Moses 
died. Dr. Newman Smythe, a noted liberal, has just 
been elected to teach theology in And over Theological 
Seminary. It is well known that he does not hold to 
the old idea of supernatural revelation. The Church 
is gradually deserting supernaturalism. 

(2.) We do not need to put anything in the place of 
the Scriptures, because we do not desire to displace 
them. The Bible is a book of very great value on the 
whole. Some of its books are exceedingly noble ; others 
are a sad travesty on the name of religion, for they 
are not even moral. 

So then to those who say what will you give us in- 
stead of the Bible, we answer : By all means keep the 
Bible; read it; use it; examine it; but let it not domi- 
nate you. Use other books ; believe in the inspiration 
of all that ennobles you, or enables you to think more 
wisely or act more bravely. 

No one would today attack the Bible as a book ; but 
only as a book that claims to be above all other books ; 
the final authority on questions that run from end to 
end of eternity. 

(3. ) We not only are glad to have and to use the Bible 
of the Jews, but we are happy to be able to place 
alongside it the religious records and hopes of other 
nations of equal antiquity. It is only common sense 



A SUBSTITUTE FOR ORTHODOXY. 123 

on our part to learn what the Greeks, the Hindoos, the 
Persians, the Egyptians, thought about God, and duty, 
as well as what the Hebrews thought. And when we 
find a noble idea it does not matter on what anvil it 
was shaped; it is as much from God if it came from 
Manu as if from Moses. 

Mark you that the religious ideas of Egypt can be 
traced back at least three thousand years before Jesus. 
Those of India two thousand or twenty-five hundred. 
Those of Persia two thousand. Those of Greece one 
thousand. And some of the very fundamental princi- 
ples, such as lie in the Ten Commandments, and the 
Sermon on the Mount, are found in the oldest of 
all religious hymns. Even the Golden Rule, and the 
sentiments of the Lord's Prayer, are found repeatedly in 
the older Jewish writings, in the Buddhistic and the 
Conf utzean ; all dating centuries before Jesus. 

Do not think that I fail of appreciating the glorious 
character of the Galilean teacher when I say that we 
do not owe to him one new and original truth, but 
rather a summary and exaltation and impersonation of 
much that had been taught before. 

(4.) Instead of the standard of authority contained 
in a revealed Book we give, or hold to, what is vastly 
older than any book, the human reason ; a gift direct 
from God, given not in a corner of the earth, to a 
favored tribe, but to every man that comes into the 
flesh. 

It will take but little consideration to show you that 
the Bible so far as true is itself the product of reason, 
and therefore no way above reason. 

The theories of God and society andmoralsand politi- 
cal duty taught in the older parts of the book were 
amended or abrogated by its later writers. Polygamy 
was dropped for monogamy ; a God of absolutism for a 
God of love; the slaughter of conquered enemies was 
refined into mercy ; sacrifices of bulls and sheep given 



124 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

up for the sacrifice of a repentant heart ; circumcision 
was dropped for baptism ; the promise of a long life 
here grew into a promise of eternal life elsewhere. 
Indeed the Bible is an evolution from beginning to end. 
It would make a capital theme for a discourse, the Evo- 
lution of the God of the Bible ; showing how the brute 
force idea of the early writers gradually became be- 
fore the last book was written a God of love and law. 
That is, as men grew in reasoning power, their theol- 
ogy grew with them. The Bible followed the track of 
reason. It is a very natural product. Reason was 
always at work, and what it saw it wrote. When it 
saw better, it wrote better. And we take what it wrote 
and examine it with our reasoning power. Much of it 
is pure and eternal; much of it is evanescent. We 
reject the idea that the book called the Bible, or any 
other book, is superhuman in its authorship, or in any 
way authority above the reason as a matter of fact. 
We find about one-fifth of the race claiming to have 
a God-written Book in the Hebrew and Greek ; about 
two-fifths claiming that the words of Buddha were 
supernaturally made known, and another two-fifths as 
positively asserting and believing that they have the 
divine book in the Vedas, Koran or other voliynes. 
The proof in each case is of the same kind: (1.) the 
book claims to be inspired. (2.) Its doctrines are 
above the possibility of man to originate. (3.) There 
are prophecies contained in them which have been ful- 
filled. (4.) The blessed nature of the book as com- 
pared with all others. (1.) If you will drop preju- 
dice for one moment you will see that the claim of a 
book to be inspired amounts to nothing. ('2.) You 
will find it impossible to read a single doctrine in 
your Bible not taught by others long before it was 
written therein. (3.) The prophecies were not writ- 
ten prior to the events narrated, except vague and 
purely rational anticipations of wise statesmen. (4.) 



A SUBSTITUTE FOR ORTHODOXY. 125 

i 

The comparative value of the Bible is great because it 
is the record of a great deal of the best moral develop- 
ment of the race, especially including the life and 
teachings of Jesus. (5.) Buddhism comes to us 
with precisely the same arguments in favor of its Holy 
Books. (6.) And when as a final argument you urge, 
as you do in your creeds, that the only convincing 
and absolute proof of your book is the inward work of 
the Holy Spirit in our hearts, you simply say that we 
cannot discuss whether the Scriptures are inspired 
until we believe they are; and so they are above 
reason, and you do well to condemn reason, and 
aver that faith is above reason. But we think 
we also do well to refuse to believe until we are con- 
vinced ; and we refuse to despise reason, since God 
gave to man reason before he gave him pen, penman 
or manuscripts. So you see that not only do we not 
reject the Bible, but we cease to reject other Bibles, not 
Jewish or Greek in origin. We have learned that God 
has always been in human reason, and that all ages and 
climes have something good to tell us. Therefore 
open your hearts and widen your minds to accept all 
truth rather than conceitedly reiterate we have all truth 
in our scriptures, and they only are inspired of God. 
"The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof." 
"Thefield is the world," is not only true for man, but vastly 
more true of Him who fills the world with his presence. 
Now, what do we say in averring that reason is 
man's only and final standard of truth and duty? 
Simply this, that the Creator made us each with a 
faculty to examine the world, and to study duty; an 
intellectual and moral ability to weigh obligation. This 
he gave before any book was written. No book would 
have been written but for this. The Scriptures are, 
because reason was. God did not inspire fingers to 
write, but brains. And how do you know the book is 
inspired? You judge so; you argue so; you reason. 



126 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

But, secondly, it is charged upon us that we assail 
and destroy the current theology of the Church, which 
rests 

(1.) In a Triune God. 

(2.) In man as a fallen being. 

(3.) In God as angry at the sinner. 

(4.) In the atonement made by the death of 
Jesus. 

(5.) In Jesus as himself God. 

(6.) In heaven and hell as prepared by God for 
eternal abodes of reward or punishment. 

And what do we offer as a substitute? 

First, we reject the doctrine of a Triune God. 
(1.) Because we cannot know anything so definite of 
an Infinite Being. (2.) We cannot comprehend any 
such idea as three persons of one substance, power 
and eternity. (3.) Because if the Scriptures be not 
supernatural, there is no revelation of such a Being. 
(4.) Nature teaches only one supreme and eternal. 
(5.) The powers of these three persons conflict, 
because the Father decrees eternally what shall be, the 
Son dies to determine what may be, the Holy Spirit 
works to confirm what is already a necessity, and man, 
as a free agent, decides whether the three persons have 
willed and worked in vain. 

And in rejecting the idea of the Trinity, we equally 
reject the theory that the Jehovah of the Old Testa- 
ment in any way represents the moral and universal 
benevolence embraced in the modern idea of God. 
We believe in no God who dwells outside of matter, 
and makes matter from nothing. The Old Testament 
Jehovah is a very gross conception of brute force, 
rarely lightened* up by a touch of mercy or spiritu- 
ality. This is proved by the frequent commands issued 
to slaughter children; to invade peaceable neighbors 
to rob them of their possessions; to torture whole 
families for the slightest offences of a single mem- 



A SUBSTITUTE FOR ORTHODOXY. 127 

ber; to dethrone kings for indulging in mercy to the 
conquered. Indeed, if you will make a candid exam- 
ination of the Scriptures, you will see that the God of 
the earlier writers in the collection is by no means the 
God of the later. God, as you trace the idea along 
the centuries, is, as I have said, a subject of evolu- 
tion. The old brute force idea slowly passes into that 
of a God of good will. 

What do we propose to give in place of faith in 
the Jewish God of one thousand five hundred years 
before Jesus, and the Trinity of fifteen hundred years 
after Jesus? I answer, modern theism teaches that 
the universe of matter is nothing more nor less than an 
expression of intelligence and moral law. Within, and 
inter-penetrating all that the senses discover is an 
intangible something, as within and inter-penetrating 
our bodies is an intangible purposing force which we 
never deny. 

Theism asserts precisely what Paul and Jesus did, 
that God is a spirit everywhere in nature, literally 
seen in his universal body. 

Therefore, in rejecting the Jehovah of Jewish his- 
tory, and all the stories concerning him, we do nothing 
more than conceive of the Supreme according to the 
better light of our own age. We lift our souls to the 
essential Word that always was, and is, and will be. 
We refuse to consider the ideas of certain ancient 
people concerning the Supreme to be worthy of this day. 

(2.) In the place of the doctrine of man as a fallen 

being, we believe that man is a being undergoing 

moral and intellectual evolution, as he Iirs undergone 

physical evolution. We see that in the long stretch of 

time he has made steady progress, and we believe 

he always will improve. 

" For step by step since Time began 
We see the steady gain of man; 
That all of good the past has had, 
Remains to make our own time glad." 



128 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

There is in anthropology no proof that man under- 
went the test in Eden and the change. Nor does he exist 
to-day as naturally a hater of good and God. We shall 
never again be able to quote against our pure mothers 
" in sin they conceived us." Child-bearing is not a curse. 
There is no Eden like that which man himself creates, 
that is, a home of love and honor. The first principle 
of progress is not to believe that all men by nature 
deserve hell, but that by nature man is as yet the 
grandest product of nature, and full of hope. 

We deny that man by his fall or otherwise has 
become dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the 
faculties and parts of his soul. 

Such a doctrine degrades pure motherhood, wife- 
hood and the angels in our cradles. It is a doctrine 
that no man can confess without denying it of his own 
soul; for he knows that his aspirations are not alto- 
gether downward; neither are there any saints whose 
earthliness is wholly eliminated. 

We teach, on the contrary, that man is a being in 
whom the spirit of heredity from God is constantly a 
power to ennoble, and that the race will grow wiser 
and better precisely in proportion as men learn to use 
their reasons. 

Instead of the theory that God is angry with the 
sinner in so far as to withdraw himself from all who 
do not come to him through an atonement, we offer 
the doctrine that God is vastly above our human 
passions. Our only conception of a God must be that 
of an infinite Spirit of Nature; with a complete com- 
prehension of that absolute good into which all that 
we call evil pours, as well as all that we call good; to 
whom and in whom all is good. 

God can no more withdraw himself from one part 
of the universe than another. " We live in him and 
move in him and have our being in him." 

(3. ) We reject the idea of an angry God, a God hating 



A SUBSTITUTE FOE ORTHODOXY. 129 

man, and an antagonism by nature between the 
infinite and finite. Everywhere in all ages have been 
upward lookers. We need not deny the terrible wick- 
edness that has marred our history; but there have 
been grand men born, and not a few of them. And 
what is better, the moral force of the world palpably 
increases. We deny altogether the idea of man as 
under the curse of God either through the sin of Adam 
or through his own sin. 

(4.) In place of the atonement, we offer the larger 
faith that God requires no pacificatory death ; but that 
every man shall turn to him and live. We point you 
to the great moral law, that whoever wills to do right 
is on the road to joy. We cannot believe that there is 
any other atonement between spirit and spirit than the 
desire to make amends for evil. Would you go to 
God? Lo! you are with him. Would you be his 
child? The wish makes you such. Language is poor 
to tell the plenitude of patience and tenderness that 
lies in a single mother's heart for her own child. I 
cannot see that it is reasonable to suppose any less 
pitiful tenderness to exist in him you call Heavenly 
Father. Were he as exacting as you say, he would 
long ago have destroyed the world. We were not cre- 
ated as an experiment, but as thoughts to be developed. 
Jesus gave us the* true idea of God in the Parable of 
the Prodigal. Yes, you sing the true doctrine in that 
hymn of the " Ninety and Nine." It is the deepest 
law of Nature that the good soul cares more for the 
wanderer who went astray, who was lost and is found, 
than for those who have always been safe. 

(5.) In place of the doctrine that Jesus is divine, 
we offer the doctrine, which is proved by all history, 
that he was supremely and intensely human. No man 
can become acquainted with the history of thought 
among the leading nations of antiquity without aston- 
ishment at seeing how those schools of thought all 



130 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

converged in Palestine. Out of the seething came a 
natural product ; that product was such men as Hillel, 
Gamaliel, Philo and Jesus. 

That he should have been deified is no wonder. 
Among orientals all heroes were deified. The Romans 
even deemed their emperors to be gods, and built 
altars to them. Emperors did the same to their favor- 
ites. The famous Egyptian Rosetta Stone tells how 
the priests decreed Ptolemy to be a god. 

Buddha, who was so truly a man, had not been dead 
two centuries before his followers were everywhere 
declaring him to have been'a god on earth. 

In India to-day there is a car called the Car of Jug- 
gernaut Its object is to exalt the idea of self-sacri- 
fice by the brutal method of dying under its wheels. 
Read the ch arming, ennobling story of Buddha, how 
he suffered for others, and what he taught of charity 
and mercy, and then tell me if you can see in this 
hideous Juggernaut anything of that high spirit. And 
yet so strangely, so totally can a great teacher be mis- 
understood and transformed by his followers that 
Buddha and Juggernaut are one. Not more strange 
or more total is the transformation which makes of 
Jesus, the human brother, the poor man's hope, the 
sinner's friend, the tender-hearted God-child, God 
himself; and then, as God, sets him up as the dread 
Judge of a day of doom, beneath whose unbending 
wrath millions are crushed forever. 

(6.) As a consequence we reject wholly the idea of 
heavens and hells to which we are to be consigned 
after life. These are absolute fictions without as much 
basis as the old theory of the world as flat and resting 
on a coiled serpent. If you will take the trouble to 
search after the origin of such notions you can find 
that they grew up before Jesus, and were accepted by 
him as he found them. Their origin was among the 
Persians and Egyptians. Hell, however, as a place 



A SUBSTITUTE FOR ORTHODOXY. i31 

of eternal torture, is a later invention of the Chris- 
tians. 

I cannot have time to discuss them; they equally 
contravene all that we know of law or justice. Instead, 
we know simply this, that virtue leads to peace, and 
wrong-doing to misery. Of the great future, outside 
this life, you do not know anything, except that, so 
long as you hold your individuality, you must be gov- 
erned by the same laws as now. 

I have thus tried to answer your question, "What 
will you substitute for orthodoxy ?" I am aware that 
the reply involves a revolution. But I have tried to 
express to you what I feel confident is going on in the 
field of religious inquiry. The end will be a total sub- 
version of the system of salvation involving super- 
naturalism and superhuman knowledge of the will and 
plan of God. Salvation is the accord that we give to 
moral, intellectual and physical law. 

To tamper with a divine book and God's own word 
is most reprehensible. Prove to me that you have 
such, and I will not dare to do, as so many in your fold 
are doing, amend it, or interpret away half its mean- 
ing. Do you really believe the Bible is God's revealed 
and inspired book? Shame on you if you do not sub- 
mit to its letter. I do not believe it, and I believe the 
a'ge is rapidly coming to the same conviction. I am 
most emphatically a Christian ; that is, in the drift and 
aim of Jesus' life and work I see a splendid ideal for a 
human life. I think that very much of his gospel is 
universal and eternal truth. But the superincumbent 
mass, which has been piled upon the pure and simple 
gospel of Jesus, is a perversion of his whole spirit and 
purpose. Calvinism is not any more Christianity than 
it is good logic. You shall not compel me to believe 
the Westminster Catechism because I like the Sermon 
on the Mount. More than this, I receive the gospel of 
Jesus as the best words of a remarkable teacher, not 



132 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

as divine, but as human reason. I do not understand 
how you can compare what you get in Matthew with 
the statements I find in your creeds. Why am I less 
a follower of Jesus because I will take only Jesus? 
You come to me with a vast array of astounding state- 
ments involving the miraculous subversion of the most 
fixed laws of nature ; involving the absolute infinity of 
a finite person; involving a method of proof on the 
part of God that never before and never since has he 
indulged in; involving the cruelty of Deity, and the 
existence of his eternal torture house; involving the 
belief that a miracle, such as turning water into wine, 
proves more than the fixity of the stars in their sublime 
courses; and if I do not believe this, lo! I hate moral 
restraint, I am breaking down the barriers that keep 
men from sin. Look around and tell me, are these men 
worse than those in your churches? Are we evermore 
to hear that Goethe and Jefferson and Sumner, and 
Lincoln and Longfellow and Parker hate God and love 
license ? 

It is the aftergrowth of myth that overlies the teach- 
ings and life of Jesus; this, and this only, that we 
reject. If you will study history you will find that all 
religions have gone through the same process of sup- 
plemental and false growth. 

Do you ask for justice? We affirm it, both as bind- 
ing upon God and man. Do you ask for truth? It 
is that we above all desire to know. Do you ask for 
charity? We hold with Jesus that it is the fruit of all 
virtue. Do you ask for purity? We stand for the 
honor and sanctity of the family, and for the chastity 
of the soul. Temperance, self-government, honor for 
the good, faith in God and in man ; these are not your 
private property. 

Once more let me ask you to consider if you have 
not made a mistake in your estimate of religion as 
compared with morals. (1). What do you need to 



A SUBSTITCTE FOR ORTHODOXY. 133 

make a good neighbor? Is it honor, truth, and purity 
or is it the critical belief in inspiration and the atone- 
ment? (2). When you vote for a man to occupy high 
office, which is of prime importance in your judgment, 
official trust, or belief in the Trinity? (3.) When you 
come down to a quiet consideration of your own boys, 
which is most important, a sound and incorruptible 
character, a good, solid habit of unimpeachableness, or 
a fixed faith in Jesus as their Savior? 

You say that in all such cases sound morals and 
sound believing may and ought to go together; and 
that furthermore you believe that no one can become 
true to himself, and inherently good, if he do not go 
to God through Christ. 

My good friend, if you will use a very little consid- 
eration you will see that your Old Testament heroes 
and prophets were saved without Jesus, and for thou- 
sands of years I have shown you that the world had its 
noble fellows, its pure wives, its holy mothers, just as 
now; and they were not Christians. Is it not just pos- 
sible that we have been very conceited in placing too 
high an estimate on our religious character, and too 
low an estimate on the character of the vast bulk of 
the human race out of our faith. 

Again, what practicable helps have we, comparable 
with a divine book? We have the book still left, and 
just as good as ever. We have it as human, however. 
But while one book is depressed, thousands are exalted. 
Belief in supernaturalism makes all other thought com- 
parably mean. To teach one divine book you must 
denounce other religions as heathenism. Do away with 
supernaturalism, and you begin to put a better estimate 
on other reasoning. Whatever helps us upward is holy. 
Buddha, Mahomet, Confucius, Luther, Savanarola, 
Gregory and others, are all able to assist. Science is 
the voice of God. It deals with his living presence. 
It is his voice and not his pen. 



134 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

If I wish to save a man, I do not say believe; but 
think. I want to establish in him faith in reason, in 
virtue, in charity. I want to get him at some honest 
industry, where he will be blessed, and bless others. 
But you say he needs the convincing and converting 
power of the Holy Spirit. If you mean by that that he 
needs a supernatural influence, I deny it. If you mean 
he needs the influence of God, then let me tell you 
God never ceases to influence any soul to the right. 
You must not assume to farm out the Infinite as a 
supernatural, unusual, irregular power, to be begged 
for. God is more anxious to save than you are to help 
him to save. A good orthodox friend said the other 
day: "Well, Mrs. Van Cott converted a great many 
persons, and it seemed to be all right; but where are 
they now?" You go around the churches and take the 
statistics ; and then sit down, and see if you can say 
God's spirit is any more in such an excitement than 
he is in a quiet summer's day. I tell you a vast deal 
of ruin is wrought by this'belief in supernaturalism. 
Parents do not bring up their children in the nurture 
of the Lord, but wait for a revival to convert them. 
Figures tell you what such conversions are worth. 

A friend wrote to me a while ago: "Will you not 
point out the power there is in the night sky and in the 
study of nature to lift us above mean thoughts." Yes, 
I will; and when you stop looking for a miraculous 
appearance of God in a bedlam of cries and learn that 
he is in all things, the life, the soul, the thought of 
those skies, full of stars; of the spring, full of puls- 
ating joy; of the summer, warm with peace, you will 
nestle to Him as his child. These men, who offer me 
God on special occasions, rob me of his constant pres- 
ence. When men are taught to link their thoughts of 
God with all that is grand, or beautiful, in the world 
itself, they will no longer be ashamed of being relig- 
ious. There is a deep-seated shame now abroad of 



THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 185 

being a worshipper. Why? I think it is because men 
recognize God as some one apart from the world; to 
whom they go with the unmanly purpose of begging. 
Every one scorns being a beggar, until he is beggarly 
in spirit. But the child of God stands beneath the 
stars, and says, all, all is my inheritance! mine to 
study! mine to enjoy! The world is, in every leaf of 
it, my library. It is home, and the soul of all is my 
origin: my Father. 



THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 

Theology, from theos logos, means logic about God, 
or a logical conception of God and his doings. I pro- 
pose to review and contrast current theology with 
Theism — which is both an older and a newer theology. 

Current theology, in its most logical form, runs 
thus: There is, 

1. God and nothing else — no man, nor worlds; no 
matter to make worlds or men of. 

2. Matter made by the will of God out of "nothing ; 
an absolute creation. 

* 3. Matter moulded into worlds, suns and universes; 
and on these, matter made into plants and animals, in- 
cluding man. 

4. Laws established to govern the material and 
moral universe. 

5. Man promptly breaks law, and involves himself 
in fixed and hereditary antagonism to God. 

6. God, of His own good pleasure, decrees some to 
eternal life, and others to eternal damnation, including 
those yet unborn. This decree was dated before the 
foundation of the world, but published after the first 
man was made. 

7. These decrees are to be fulfilled only by the send- 
ing of Himself as a Son in the flesh, to die, that those 



136 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

who believed in Him might be the saved. This is the 
central doctrine of orthodoxy, that no one can be 
justly saved by God, except through the blood of His 
Son Jesus — all others being irrevocably given over to 
eternal doom. 

8. Man's nature being inherently bad, he cannot 
even believe in Jesus, except as he is led by the Holy 
Ghost. 

9. We have thus God the Creator, God tjie Atoner, 
and God the Helper, or Father, Son and Holy Spirit — 
three persons with one nature — a divine mystery, 
which becomes an essential part of true belief. 

10. Life becomes thus a mere probation period; 
the world a ruined world; man fallen; God angry; 
the devil largely master, and the whole duty of 
man to try to save a few souls from the terrible 
catastrophe. 

11. To avert the necessities of the case, God has 
prepared two other worlds, called heaven and hell, for 
the final reception of the saved and lost — one a para- 
dise of pleasure, the other a pit of torture. 

12. The elect at death are to be taken to their final 
abode, there to see God and to enjoy him; the lost 
are to be plunged into their hopeless misery. This*is 
for the glory of God. He has done it for His own 
glory, which is the sole end of creation. 

13. This separation of saved and lostwill cut right 
through families and separate friends — one being 
saved and another lost; yet the saved are to be ren- 
dered more blissful, knowing of the punishment of 
the damned, since it redounds to the glory of Him whom 
they serve. 

14. Beyond this life free choice ends, and there is 
henceforth only growth in that direction which was 
taken before death — the good intensifying their right- 
eousness, and the evil growing infinitely bad. This 
state of things is perpetual. 



THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 137 

So closes the plan of creation and the scheme of 
redemption. It is a panorama, running through a few 
thousands of years, but involving the eternal sadness 
and hopelessness of the vast mass of all created intelli- 
gences. It involves the most terrible failure of the 
whole creative design, the fall of man, the death of a 
God, the total wreck of a large part of the human race. 
If angels could weep, heaven might well be shrouded 
for a million of years, the Song of the Lamb turned into 
a funeral wail, the joys of paradise foregone for a sea- 
son, while the redeemed organized into a pitiful effort 
to undo the great mistake. We cannot but turn with 
wonder to the great White Throne to learn why He 
who, with Almighty will, has foreseen and decreed it all, 
has done what would stamp one of His creatures in so 
doing as too mean to exist. We cannot help thinking 
that had it been our case, we would 

1. Never have created what we foresaw would be 
miserable; for the endless woe of one soul more than 
balances the joys of the millions of the happy. 

2. We would never have allowed a devil to continue 
his vile work, but would have killed him. 

3. We would have gladly forgiven every sor- 
rowing soul without a thought of a sacrifice and 
atonement. 

4. We would rather vacate the throne than be mon- 
arch of a hell and God of the damned. Indeed, such 
thoughts do run incoherently through the great ortho- 
dox scheme. There is a strange blending of mercy 
and vengeance, and a hapless struggle of pity with 
infinite selfishness. It will make the hardest soul weep 
to read the story of Calvary, and we wonder as much 
to find these frescoes of holy tenderness on the walls of 
orthodox superstition as at the demonism which flames 
in the frescoes of Dante. 

I turn now with pleasure to a theology quite unlike, 
if not the direct opposite of that which I have outlined. 



138 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

It is the theology most appropriately termed Theistic. 
Its principles run as follows: 

1. God and matter; God the spirit, matter the cloth- 
ing or phenomena — equally eternal. 

2. God forever evolving new and progressive ideas 
in matter. 

3. Among the appearances or phenomena of the 
Divine Being are universes, suns, worlds ; and on these 
worlds life. 

4. This life steadily pressing forward into higher 
forms, until it reaches intelligence and reason. 

5. At this point God enters into the same relation 
to us that a father does to a life begotten of himself; 
he is father, and man is his child. 

6. The child man, like all childish beings, is weak 
and unwise and wilful, and thus often injures himself 
physically and morally. 

7. The law and the work of God are every day steadily 
applied to win man from ruinous practices and save him. 

8. He is saved when he is brought up to that degree 
of self-control and innate mastery that he can obey his 
reason, which is the Bible in his brain. He is lost if 
he fail to secure that self-poise, and waste his powers 
in law-breaking. 

9. This world is marvelously adapted to breed and 
foster, to feed and educate souls; and man, even when 
weak and sinful, is the highest object of interest that 
the material universe holds. 

10. God never deserts man nor is angry at him ; but 
is calmly just, and as tender as any wise earthly parent. 
Sunshine and rain, calm words and benign influences 
are the gifts that wait on our paths at every turn. We 
have but to call, when, as Goethe says, holy thoughts, 
like free children of God, spring up all around us, cry- 
ing out, "Here we are, here we are;" or, as Jesus says, 
only ask, and it shall be given you; only seek, and you 
will find; only knock, and it shall be opened to you. 



THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 139 

11. Spiritually God works on our hearts to win us 
to the noble and virtuous; and there is never a soul 
born into the world but the divinest thought is whis- 
pered in his soul that he can hear. 

12. Jesus and many others have been so gloriously 
begotten that they inherit not only from their parents, 
but they are the children of an era. Ten generations 
concentrate their yearnings in such souls. These are 
the children of humanity — very dear to the world, and 
of inestimable value. 

13. God's character is the same, and his relationship 
to us is the same, on both sides of the grave. He is 
no more loving here than there. Whoever wishes to 
become honorable at any time, anywhere, finds welcome 
arms of universal love at once folded about him. 

14. Heavens and hells are the sickly dreams of 
moral shiftlessness and cowardly terror. They are no 
more real than anv other vision of delirium. 

15. Men pass into the next life under the same laws 
of obligation, and of cause and consequence, that 
exist here. The dying soul either dies out, or new 
recuperative forces succeed in lifting it to self-posses- 
sion. 

Now let me briefly apply these two theologies to 
society and trace their workings on the life of man: 

1. The current theology inculcates false views of 
God, thus depriving us of that instinctive relation 
which we bear to spirit. God is a being outside of 
matter, the autocrat of our destinies, who demands our 
love under penalties, yet his deeds do not accord with 
our innate sense of justice. 

2. It bases religion upon knowledge of a scheme of 
salvation whose terms but a fraction of the race can 
know; engendering dread, it demands affection, leav- 
ing the soul in a ferment of hopeless effort. 

3. It denounces this world as corrupting, thus 
placing scientific knowledge below credibility to tradi- 



140 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

tion, and teaching that dissatisfaction with the present 
which must become a chronic disposition of our 
natures. No possible adjustment can ever satisfy one 
who has been educated to expect the fulfillment of the 
wildest dreams of his fancy. Heaven is simply the 
storehouse where uneasy spirits expect to find all im- 
possibilities possible. 

4. It gives one set of laws for moral growth on this 
side of the grave, and another beyond. Here we are 
to pity and bear and forbear — there our joy is at least 
not lessened at the knowledge of the woe of our fel- 
lows. God is here infinitely tender — there infinitely 
relentless. Here he is the Jesus — there the Tamerlane. 
Here we are happy only as we conquer — there we are 
happy without victories. Here we are good only by 
choice — there we are made good. Here we are edu- 
cated that the highest virtue is to deny ourselves — 
there our chief end is ease, rest, joy, peace. 

5. The logical outcome of orthodoxy must be final 
moral chaos. So far as we can judge from moral law 
now in operation, heaven and hell must be preliminary 
to a total collapse of creation. 

A tract published by the American Tract Society 
says: "The wicked in hell utter as many blasphemies 
against God as the happy souls in heaven shout hal- 
lelujahs to His praise." " Their torment will eternally 
increase," said President Finney; so that we have a 
system of increasing misery and multiplied sin. Now, 
if we can judge at all by the history of this world, sin 
is much more likely to propagate and multiply itself 
than is goodness, so soon as the most active efforts of 
goodness are withdrawn. We must, therefore, suppose 
hell to be a steadily intensifying and increasing power 
in the universe. Heaven, by the very statement of it, 
is a withdrawal of the best trained forces of virtue 
from active duty. What must be the end of such a 
state of things can only be this: Heaven will rust out 



THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 141 

and hell be the only finality. For my part, I believe, 
on the contrary, that all the forces of goodness and 
truth and light in the universe are growing more and 
more organic, and better skilled, and instinctively active 
to oppose evil; and I believe also that evil is always, 
by its nature, disintegrating and passing into death — 
that good must increase and badness decrease. I 
believe the whole order of things in physical nature 
and in moral nature is developing toward the better 
and more perfect; — that there is a grand law of progress 
penetrating and controlling every fiber of matter, every 
breath of soul, compelling improvement. History, 
geology, individual life, faith in God, vouch for this; 
and there is no other possible outlook than toward 
physical equilibrium, moral order and unity in God. 
The Persian saw it in what he called the Battle of 
Light and Darkness, in which light must ultimately 
overcome darkness. Jesus saw it when he proclaimed 
the ultimate extinction of the confirmed evil. John 
saw it when he saw death and hell cast into a lake of 
fire, to be totally consumed. I do not say that every 
one shall retain his identity through all the friction of 
matter and sin, but that only goodness and* virtue and 
joy shall survive. 

I turn now with pleasure to trace the effect of The- 
ism on the soul and on humanity: 

1. Its doctrine of God must develop what we may 
call godliness in its believers. Teaching that we see 
God as literally to-day in all matter as we see our 
friends in their bodies, it makes the universe warm 
with the glow of home. We are not left to hope for 
or expect to see God in a future life, but to-day, every- 
where, in all things is the universal soul. The only 
change to be expected is a deeper wisdom to compre- 
hend the spirit that inter-penetrates matter. The con- 
trast is between a Being of indefinite proportions, on a 
throne somewhere, exercising power somehow over His 



142 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

creatures, whom He has made from nothing and will 
carry somewhere to meet Him at some time; and a 
Being in whom we live and move and have our being 
— whose life flows in us, as the blood of a father and 
the thought of a father flows in a son ; who folds us in 
His arms of light every morning, whose breast is the 
green sod, whose breath is the perfume of flowers — 
the Being of whom we say, literally, He is omnipresent. 

2. Theism ennobles humanity ; it makes man sacred; 
it could not excuse self-torture or human bondage; it 
could not tolerate the doctrines of total depravity, or 
original sin, or eternal punishment; for man is literally 
the child of God. It teaches that man is not fallen, 
but that he began as a product of natural law, and is 
a developing being; that humanity is moving onward 
and upward. In man and not in books is the highest 
revelation of the divine. God lives in souls, not in 
vellum and letter-press. Know ye not, says Paul, that 
ye are the temple of God, and that the spirit of God 
dwells in you? The kingdom of God, says Jesus, is 
within you. 

3. Theism makes the present life holy by denying 
that it is approbation period. This earth is to be loved 
as our best gift. We are surrounded not by signs of 
devil mastery, not by the wreck of a ruined world, but 
by just those things that are best adapted to make us 
reasonable, strong and virtuous. We can break law if 
we will and die ; but the world is stored with immeas- 
urable wisdom to tempt- us to a life of growing honor 
and worth. Its soil is sown with poems as well as with 
corn, and we can reap, if we will, crops both for body 
and mind from every season. Theism never cants 
about the poverty or the wickedness of the world, for 
is it not the Lord's — it and tho fulness thereof? 

4. The doctrine of sin, as taught by Theism, is so 
simple and so exact that it cannot fail to wean us to 
the better life. It says not that sin is disobedience to 



THE TWO THEOLOGIES. 143 

written laws, or a failure to comprehend a creed; it is 
not an action that angers God; but it is that relation 
to the law of our being that weakens, denies or destroys 
us. Man is bound, not to feel an ecstatic emotion 
toward the Infinite spirit, but to so live that his guid- 
ing spirit shall be honor. 

These are the two theologies now contending for 
recognition as the voice of Nature and of God. Which 
shall succeed in winning our hearts? I think it not 
difficult to foresee that that one must go out which is 
burdened with superstitions and inquisitions, and that 
must survive which allies itself to science and ration- 
alism. 

In fact, current theology is mainly composed of 
barnacles that have attached themselves to the keel of 
human progress. Theism is the thought of God and 
duty which lies at the core of all religions. It is the 
earliest as well as the latest voice of the upward look- 
ing soul. 

" God of the granite and the rose, 
Soul of the sparrow and the bee, 
The mighty tide of being flows 
Through countless channels, Lord, from thee. 
• 

It leaps to life in grass and flowers, 

Through every grade of being runs, 
Till from creation's radiant towers, 
Its glory flames in stars and suns. 

O ye who sit and gaze on life 

With folded hands and fettered will, 
Who only see amid the strife 

The dark supremacy of ill, 

Know that, like birds, and streams, and flowers, 

The life that moves you is divine; 
Nor time, nor space, nor human powers 

Your God-like spirit can confine. 

God of the granite and the rose, 

Soul of the sparrow and the bee, 
The mighty tide of being flows 

Through all thy creatures back to thee 



144 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

Thus round and round the circle runs, 
A mighty sea without a shore, 

While men and angels, stars and suns 
Unite to praise thee evermore." 



NATUKAL MOEAL COMPENSATION. 

Popular religion has become thoroughly permeated 
with the idea that our lives must pass into court, and 
that our futures depend upon the decisions of that day 
of judgment. It would be difficult to conceive of any 
act for which there does not come an equivalent of re- 
ward or punishment. Heaven as a constant accumula- 
tion of the consequences of right living is a law of na- 
ture. Hell as a constantly accumulating consequence 
of wrong doing, is also a law of nature. But orthodoxy 
seems to err in these ways: (1). In attributing this 
heaven and hell to a Being outside of ourselves ; a Being 
who orders or wills these consequences of actions; 
giving heaven as a reward to his followers, and hell as 
a punishment to his enemies. (2). It errs in de- 
scribing heaven as essentially consisting of pleasure, 
and hell of suffering or sorrow. (3). As making 
heaven a locality and hell a prescribed place. (4). In 
teaching that those ultimate moral results are depend- 
ent on belief, worship or any personal relation to God. 
(5). In the representation of heaven as beyond death, 
and hell as only in the future life. (6). In teaching 
that the moral law of compensation is not universal 
and eternal ; in other words that a man at death ceases 
any longer to exercise a free choice to change from 
evil to good, or good to evil, and so being in heaven to 
pass over to hell — or being in hell to pass over to 
heaven. On the contrary, the most terrible fact con- 
nected with moral law is, that doing good tends to the 
establishment of a will for good aud a good character; 
while doing evil tends with accumulating force to fix 



NATURAL MORAL COMPENSATION. 145 

a bias toward evil and to create a character with an 
instinct for evil. The natural law seems to be toward 
that state of strong preference, that habitual choice of 
wrong, that makes it a certainty that the bad soul will 
go on that road so long as it exists. But this fixity in 
no way is caused by death, but is an increasing proba- 
bility by every wrong action, whether performed now 
or hereafter. 

I want you to look over these points one by one, and 
see the sharp irreconcilable contrast between the law of 
natural moral compensation and this system of artificial 
rewards and punishments; and I assure you you are so 
much the victim of false heredity and a very perme- 
ative false theology, that you will find you are every one 
of you indulging in sin that is defiling your heaven 
that is, expecting by some means to secure a heaven 
that is to be. 

1. God, says theology, has created this world as a 
test locality, this life as *a trial period. He has also 
created heaven to reward those who please him, and 
hell to punish those with whom he is dissatisfied. The 
same widening understanding of nature that shows us 
that this earth, and man himself, are not direct crea- 
tions, but evolutions, shows also that no condition, 
physical or moral, is ever reached except by the same 
process. Heaven is made by an accumulating power 
of good choices. It is impossible for a God to make a 
heaven for any one but himself. Man has the same 
power to make his own heaven. He can with equal in- 
dependence create a hell. You say to a coarse soul: 
Come and inhabit my palace with me. He may live 
inside your walls; but your palace is to you some- 
thing more than buildings and food. It is beauty, 
grace, harmony, hope, love, victory. None of these 
does the clown see. You cannot live together, not 
though you be in the same room and share the same 
bed. 



146 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

But the popular theology says that we shall all, if 
we are pardoned in Christ, dwell together in a heaven 
built by God. Murderers, thieves and their victims, 
or harder yet, the gross and innately base, with the clari- 
fied and upright; if so be the pardoning sacrifice be 
accepted. This false doctrine cannot be refined away 
by saying that at death the soul of the believer will be 
transformed by the power of the Holy Ghost. Heaven 
and hell are natural consequences of univeral natural 
law. Man alone can build either the one or the other, 
and you can only inhabit that heaven which you your- 
self construct, or that hell you yourself involve. No 
one can build a hell except out of bad choices. If God 
build a hell, he contains in himself the material of 
that which he makes, and such a view of God is ab- 
horrent to all who think of him or seek him. 

2. Now look at the second point — that heaven does 
not consist in pleasure, neither hell in pain or sorrow. 
Moral character is seriously poisoned by the false rep- 
resentations of preachers aad priests, who paint heaven 
as perpetual bliss. In the ordinary sense, heaven is 
less blissful than hell ; in the ordinary sense hell is 
more delightful than heaven. It is folly to try to drive 
men to a right choice by falsifying the consequences. 
It is true of an active, right life that it is full of hard 
work. The business man understands that he is to en- 
gage in a life of care and toil. The wife ought to 
comprehend that she becomes such only to enter into 
a vast amount of wearisome labor. The farmer knows 
he will get his crops only by the sweat of his brow. 
Do they then refuse to become business men? Or do 
people refuse to marry? Life is altogether, in any 
proper phase of it, or satisfactory phase, a succession 
of cares. But the right business man is not willing to 
give up business, and the wife finds her heaven in a 
nursery and a kitchen. Seeking pleasure is running 
away from heaven. The pleasure seeker frequents 






NATURAL MORAL COMPENSATION. 147 

divorce courts and talks of the bliss of a life of ease. 
That the end of heaven is happiness, I do not question. 
Walking the path of study, hard study, is sure to bring 
you to the heights of glory; and the wife or husband 
gets a growing victory over the cares of life. But the 
butterfly daughter and the careworn mother lie down 
at night, the first in hell, the second in heaven. Con- 
sciousness of right, and the performance of duty alone 
make heaven; yet the pleasures, the ease, the joys, 
belong to those who do not have a consciousness of 
right. Happiness is in no sense whatever the object 
of a right soul ; but it is to so act that itself will most 
rapidly develop the virtues, and its neighbors be helped 
to do the same. Therefore, I hold that no teaching 
can more sadly debauch morals and destroy true relig- 
ious character, than that heaven is constituted of pleas- 
ure, and hell of sorrow. The great future of a noble 
soul is, not to be merely happy in a paradise, but to be 
useful and honorable, and to be more valuable to itself 
and others. 

3. It follows that my third point is equally well 
taken, namely, that orthodoxy errs in making heaven 
essentially a locality, and hell a prescribed place. 
Heaven is the state of the soul; hell is the same. 
They may exist side by side in two persons who sit in 
adjacent seats. But they are also relative, and matters 
of perpetual change. That is, your heaven may become 
a thousand times more heavenly, and you may, nay 
must, if bad, go on to intensifying consequences. The 
only locality of paradise is a man's own soul, and its 
surroundings. But you must not forget the wonderful 
power of the mind to widen out its view of the world, 
to enlarge its compass, and with every enlargement to 
enlarge its heaven. The growing soul gathers in lar- 
ger views of the material universe until it can enjoy 
not only a lawn of flowers, but valleys of landscapes; 
and then, by the power of learning, it gathers the 



148 LIBEETY AND LIFE. 

world, and even the starry worlds into itself. And to 
it, all, all is beautiful, good, true — it is heaven. 
Another finds neither the beautiful, the true nor the 
good, but is blind to all such universal truths. The 
heaven of the other is his hell. So the good soul gets 
constantly larger views of life, and what it is to live. 
It loves truth more; sees the charm of the virtues; 
grows inherently more honorable, more just, less a 
creature of excitement; so its heaven widens; all its 
ideas of social life are more humane ; of politics more 
beneficient; of humanity more sympathetic. This 
man's heaven is to do the will of the divine Father. It 
is not a spot, a garden, or a city, but a widening life, 
a widening power. But the power on tbe other hand, 
is just as apparent of a soul to en large its own night, 
and to foul the very skies with his inner badness. It 
is like the power of the sepia, that conceals itself by 
ejecting a black fluid, till the water about it is as black 
as ink ; it is this power enlarged so that it can blacken 
a whole ocean. 

4. We cannot too rapidly bring ourselves to see that 
moral wrong in no way involves our personal relation 
to any beings but those whom we can injure by our 
wrong; and those beings are (1) ourselves, and (2) our 
fellow creatures. An infinite and absolute being can- 
not be injured. He cannot be aggrieved, for he is 
absolute in his bliss. He is not made miserable, nor is 
he angered by every atomic creature who desires to 
annoy him. Practically our actions know no such 
being ; and when theology undertakes to represent him 
as aggrieved it makes him an angry person whose plans 
ha^ve been balked. Of course such a God is no God 
at all. The only damage of sin is to ourselves, and our 
neighbors; and moral law goes no farther than to 
require us to preserve or save ourselves, and preserve 
or save others whom we influence. God is that infinite 
existence that is under infinite obligation to do right 



NATURAL MORAL COMPENSATION. 149 

by us ; but our relations to him cover only ourselves 
and our neighbors. An unjust God is in hell as much 
as an unjust man. The moral law is as applicable to 
the great as the small. God can be happy only by 
being good. And just as surely as you represent God as 
any way arbitrary and unjust you will think of him as 
a disappointed being. I do not mean to say that God 
is not the greatest thought of the soul; and that 
thoughts of the divine go far to make material out of 
which we make heaven. But it is God as seen in our- 
selves, and in our fellows; for there is no vision of 
Deity so perfect as a child's untarnished soul, except 
the soul of that child's mother, burnished by her self 
devotion to his salvation from evil. 

Vast power has been wasted by millions of devotees 
to God, seeking paradise by worship. You see what it 
comes to in the monk, who hates a woman, and never 
had a babe; you see what it comes to in the religious 
dreamers, who swing incense to the eternal, in churches 
that are built by the pennies that the poor need for 
bread ; you see what it comes to in the rich pews where 
millionaires glorify God, but rent vile tenements to the 
poor at exorbitant rates, caring neither for body nor 
soul. 

5. The error is still more fatal, that heaven and hell 
do not pertain to this life, but are the results that fol- 
low the decision of God at a judgment day. This 
notion is a survival of the worst of paganism— a pagan- 
ism that loses the sight of inherent moral worth, and 
the natural compensation of right or wrong doing, and 
considers only whether a man be condemned for his 
villainy. Notice what a shocking affair the orthodox 
creed makes of this whole judgment. It represents a 
man as escaping from hell, and going to heaven, not 
from inherent value of character; not from worth of 
his own. The last of all things to be considered at the 
judgment is a man's worth. He is presumed to have 



150 LIBERTY AND LTFK. 

none. Life thus cannot weigh on the judgment day. 
It is thrown away. No matter how good, how honor- 
able, how charitable, how self -masterful, it will not 
count. The only question is the attribution to him of the 
rightness of the Lord Jesus Christ. So the vilest 
character is worth as much as the most virtuous. What 
follows? Just that follows which curses society, and 
keeps Christendom practically heathendom. It follows 
that men aim, that Christians pray and the religious 
expect to appease the judge, to secure his leniency, to 
acquire the consequences of Jesus' death; instead of 
seeking to lead such a life that they shall be in heaven 
here, and now; a heaven that no judge nor power can 
expel them from but their own change of purpose. 

Logically follows the slough of all pollution — that 
if it were not for losing heaven, we, the religious 
people, would indulge in what is now given in exchange 
for heaven — Lust, if done under the shield of a relig- 
ious sacrament, marriage, is no longer lust, although 
it rots the body tissue, weakens the brain, debauches 
sentiment, destroys the power of reason, and curses 
children before they are borne. The real Jehovah who 
predestinates some to eternal damnation, is the man 
or woman who begets a life without supreme consider- 
ation of its inherent tendencies to moral and physical 
strength. Such Jehovahs are fulminating their decrees 
in Christian homes; and we are not half so much 
shocked at this exercise of infernal power, as we are 
at the silly statement that the Almighty is of like sort. 
Practical evils are what ought to disturb us. It does 
not concern me what Calvin's God did in the way of 
decrees; but it concerns me mightily that my own 
mother should rob me before birth of that nourish- 
ment which is my right. 

6. But all other mischiefs are involved in the gen- 
eral denial that moral compensation is universal and 
eternal. Eetribution is that exact equivalent which 



NATURAL MORAL COMPENSATION. 151 

follows any act whatever. In the realm of physics we 
understand that there is inevitably an exact, never 
doubtful, equivalent for expended force. You must 
learn that every moral choice has its exact and inevit- 
able consequence. Now the least of all equivalents for 
a denied soul would be to have the mean act related at 
a judgment day, or to have that act punished by pains. 
The worst evil is the immediate defilement. We need 
a religion that says to a young man, you cannot afford 
to disgrace yourself in your own person ; you are a free 
will to build yourself grandly or ignobly. There is 
but one failure in life ; that is to become yourself a 
failure. But I do not hear the appeal in this way. 
Rather, I hear that if this young man do not believe 
in Jesus, and confess his general vileness, he will not 
enter heaven when he dies. I am more interested to 
know what he enters here and now. So your candi- 
dates for eternal glory go on through this heavenless 
career, this making era, thinking it of little import- 
ance how they grow, so only they secure heaven here- 
after. Poor spavined souls! Ask them if they ex- 
pect to live hereafter as they do here, and you will 
find that not one of them thinks he could trade on 
such principles in heaven, as he does here, or run his 
political affairs on the same scale, or be, or do any 
way there as he does and is here. 

Is your heaven life to be like your earth life in any 
way? Not in the least. You dare not think so. It 
would subvert heaven ; turn it inside out. No envies, 
jealousies, petty meanness, quarrels, fickleness there. 
But here yon are not yet perfect; therefore you in- 
dulge in the use of that material which constructs 
hell; and you are in hell, and no judge or judgment 
can take you out — nothing but a reversal of your 
choices and ways of doing. 

Moral evil is not expiatory ; it is not erasable wrong, 
cannot be atoned for. Right cannot be obliterated. 



152 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

There is more truth in the story of Blue Beard than in 
your catechism. That bloody key that had the stain 
on it would not wash clean. An ocean would not 
cleanse it. It was a living fact; for time had done 
the deed. I would rather that story be taught my 
child than the story of an atoning lamb. 

Away from theology men do not make this blunder. 
Shakespeare did not learn from the Bible, but from 
nature, that when Macbeth had killed his king he had 
to carry that dreadful deed with him. And Lady 
Macbeth washes her hands in vain. " Out damned 
spot! Out, I say! Hell is murky! Who would have 
thought the old man did have so much blood in him. 
What! Will these hands ne'er be clean? Here's the 
smell of blood still! All the perfumes of Arabia will 
not sweeten this little hand ! " 

Goethe, with less cleanliness, tells the same story in 
Willhelm Meister. The world rings with it. But 
theology gives the lie to nature. It is a system 
whereby a man may escape himself. The keenest and 
truest story in the Bible is that with which it opens — 
the story of the Garden of Eden. Every man is by 
nature in a garden, but he has laws governing his re- 
lation thereto. " In the day thou eatest thereof thou 
shalt surely die." The devil said to Eve precisely 
what theology says to you today. Thou mayest eat 
and shalt not die. But you do die by every wrong 
deed ; by every sin you deduct from your power. Go 
write that story of Eden as some old ancient wrote it, 
as a natural law of conduct, and give it to your boys. 
The old Testament is to my mind the better Testament 
of the two — it is law. The story of Jonah is equally 
grand. Run from duty and you shall be swallowed up 
in trouble. Seek to go back to your obligations and 
your troubles shall leave you upon dry land. But be 
sure you do not prove again to be a coward. 

These are grand lessons worth a million prophecies 



NATURAL MORAL COMPENSATION. 153 

about some one who shall come to make good your bad 
deeds, and pacify the owner of heaven and hell. Jesus 
and his gospel follow up this line of law; of natural 
consequences. But his apostles and followers turned 
away at once to build up a theology of escape from 
law, a theology of atonement. 

On the contrary, heaven is in no way a purchasable 
place, or a purchasable condition. You cannot buy it 
by either the sorrows of another or your own unneces- 
sary sorrows. " Sacrifices and prayers," says Socrates, 
" are a sort of way you have of bartering with Gods. 
You expect them to give you an equivalent for what 
you give them. You pray for something, and in return 
you sacrifice something to them." What Socrates saw 
you see any day in this Christian land. Our hired help 
will sooner lie or steal than eat a bit of meat on fast 
day. During Lent you must not dance; you must 
give no parties; you must not eat certain foods; all 
purchase money to buy heaven. You cannot persuade 
these people that heaven is here and now. They lose 
the valuable, seeking for the valueless. Would they 
go without such foods and drinks at all times as dam- 
age the body and prevent mental power, then they 
would find heavenly compensation. But this they will 
not do. Lent is a vast cheat— -an endeavor to give the 
lie to nature; it is a brief let-up in the carnival of hell 
building. 

Morals must be built on physiology, a right of the 
body as the soul's only means of wisdom and worth. 
But fasting when you do not physically need a fast is 
not to conform to law. But to so eat and so drink, so 
sleep and so work, as far as in us lies, as to keep the 
brain cleared for action, that is the law of nature 
obeyed. You cannot cheat nature. She has eyes in 
your head, and in your feet, in your stomach and your 
secret chamber. Not one shade of intent, even, can es- 
cape her; so that you shall not have exact compensation. 



154 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

I do not deny the compensation of time. But the 
fact that a man who jumps into the North river 
and saves a life gets afterward a watch, is of less 
importance than the ever golden uncorrodable joy in 
that man's heart that he did a good deed. The watch 
for a while he will cherish. He will think of it — 
admire it. It is beautiful. It is useful. But in the 
old man's soul, when he gathers his grandchildren 
about his knees, still ticks the joy of his deed; but 
the watch has long since been laid away, as a half-for- 
gotten souvenir. 

No, death settles nothing; it is choice that settles 
everything. Here or hereafter your will is the arbiter 
of yourself. Probation is a farce. Nature never lets 
up. She has no period in which you shall be tried, 
and not take the consequences as you go. Nor is there 
any period when by fiat she cuts off your choice and 
fixes your doom. 

You are hopeless only when you have lost the way 
back to your ship of truth. You are never damned, 
but only growing damned; you are never saved, but 
only increasing in moral power for good. When the cur- 
rent of life has become so strong in any direction that 
you abandon a desire to return, then you are becoming 
instinctively good; or instinctively bad. 



CHARACTER. 



Among the moral axioms of nature are the following: 

The end of God's work in man is character. 

The end of life's experience and duties is character. 

The end and object of trouble, care and sorrow is 
character. 

The end of study, thinking and research is char- 
acter. 

The end of religion is character. 



CHARACTER. 155 

There is no one thing worth living for or aiming 
after but character. 

The only one thing a man can carry through death 
is character. 

The one material which is imperishable and of which 
the soul weaves its garments is character. 

If a man fail of making a .character out of his days' 
doings, he fails entirely. 

If social customs and ways of living fail to create 
for us character, they are a blunder. 

If religion and theology do not end in character 
they end in a lie. 

Salvation is the accumulation of character. 

Damnation is the destruction of character. 

You cannot save anything but character. 

These I hold to be self-evident axioms which are 
written on the door stone of life by the finger of God. 
The first lesson that a mother teaches her boy should 
be to spell out these axioms. The priest has but one 
obligation to work out from these axioms, the demon- 
stration of life's problems. Every man's life is a Euclid 
based on these self-evident truths. 

Probation is not a test of a man's willingness to 
believe, but of his willingness to be. It begins with 
choice, and ends only when the power of choice ends. 

Belief is important only as it results from a bad way 
of doing, or from a good ; and because it leads to 
farther action of the same kind. Aaron Burr believed 
in licentiousness because he was licentious; he was 
licentious because he believed it excusable. In form- 
ing character a man has to look to his theories of 
character. 

Character is therefore gauged largely by our con- 
scientious exercise of reason in thinking as well' as 
acting. Credulity curses character as badly as intenx- 
perance. Whenever you leave reason out, the true 
man goes down. Credulity is easy self-deception. 



156 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

Deception is incipient lying. If you lie to yourself, 
you teach your soul to be a liar. If you believe in a 
devil for a God, you will worship devilish character. 
Your own character will not be better than your God's. 

(1.) The theology of the day is based on salvation, 
not from characterlessness but from punishment. 

(2.) It tells us that character will not weigh with 
God at the judgment. 

(3.) It teaches that salvation is not by better doing 
and nobler accumulating, but by believing on Jesus. 

I had a dream in which I was in a monastery ; and 
there I saw one hundred of the most useless, harmless 
beings in the world. The chief of the order showed 
them to me as they were in the refectory eating their 
daily crusts and drinking their cups of water, and he 
said: "See here, all these are the glorious product 
of holy religion. These are the result of prayer and 
fasting and penance. They are the heirs of God; the 
sons of Heaven. They will one by one enter into 
eternal reward. Each one has killed self, and lives 
only in devout aspiration for another life." "But," I 
said, "what will they be good for then?" And the 
priest answered: " They will glorify God forever and 
sing his praises through eternity. They will enjoy 
themselves in eternal bliss." And I said: " O, priest, 
why not let them enjoy this world a little. It is a 
goodly place, and, if they are saints, it cannot hurt 
them." But the holy man signed the cross on his 
breast and frowned at me as an infidel. " The world," 
he said, "is a foe to holiness; the world, the flesh and 
the devil. The holy church is the only safe fold from 
these enemies. Flee to the church and ask her to 
pray for you and by her holy ordinances save your 
soul." But I said: "O priest, what shall I do with 
my body?" "Mortify it, and abase it, and humiliate 
it," he replied; then opening his robe he showed 
knotted cords wound tightly around his body, and 



CHARACTER. 157 

under his gown was a whip of many cords with which 
he daily lashed himself. Prayer, penance and fast- 
ing, then, will save the soul ; but the body is a foe. 
Let it die. 

Here, says the church, are your preserved saints; 
preserved against the day of judgment. I find the 
same process of preservation everywhere. It is 
called salvation, and the great question with our more 
modern saints is: Can any salvation go on after 
death? Joseph Cook thinks it possible that a few will 
be so shaken up in the process of dying, that, after the 
breath has left the body, but before the soul has gone, 
they will accept the terms of salvation and be admit- 
ted to paradise. Not a word about the salvation of 
manhood, of intellect, of power, of inherent values, of 
moral will, of a salvation that is summed up in charac- 
ter; but the whole question is how to save the useless, 
worn-out figment and fragment of characterlessness 
that is left after a life of folly or credulous canting. 
The question is not how to save a whole man from 
waste and wear of law-breaking and ignorance, but 
how to save a dead man from God's revenge. 

General Butler, the ideal Christian Governor of 
Massachusetts, appointed a day for fasting and prayer. 
He wished the people for one day to eat little or noth- 
ing, and to double their prayers in hopes by this 
means to secure from God necessaries that cannot be 
obtained by regular piety. When the Governor was 
inaugurated he spent several hours in telling the people 
that there was hardly a sensible institution in the 
state, or any honesty to speak of in the administration 
of what they had. Does he expect by fasting to 
secure a reform in these matters ? There is Sing Sing ; 
just now a foul blot on our State, an outrage on civili- 
zation. Can we inaugurate prison reform by going 
without our dinners? Will praying break up the con- 
tract system ? But so far as I can see from the procla- 



158 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

mation it has no idea of reform at all, but is a sort of flank 
movement to secure of God certain things that we have 
sought in vain of Congress. A few choice clauses run 
thus: The people are to assemble in their places of 
worship, there "to humble themselves in the presence 
of the Almighty and acknowledge with deep contrition 
their manifold sins and transgressions and devoutly 
deprecate his judgments and implore his merciful for- 
giveness through the merits of our blessed Lord and 
Redeemer." And among the verbosities with which 
they are to assail the throne of grace the people are 
to ask God to "relieve our commerce from the embar- 
rassments with which it is burdened, and grant that 
prosperity may again distinguish our navigation and 
fisheries, so that they who go down to the sea in ships 
and do business in great waters may have abundant 
reason to praise his holy name." So the end of this 
great day is, after all, to be fish; and not at all charac- 
ter. Somehow fish have always been closely associated 
with piety since the days of Jonah; and we may confi- 
dently expect that after the solemn and influential day 
has been celebrated the fish will come up in shoals and 
ask for hooks to hang on.* 

I stood one day by the dying bed of a very noted 
Christian, a man of large wealth and noted religiosity. 
His hours were few and his friends stood around wait- 
ing for the spirit to wave its hand in m adieu. All 
seemed anxious for only one thing. " Is our brother 
prepared to die?" The parson read a few passages 
from the Scriptures and prayed; and his prayer was 
that the dying man might renounce all his own right- 
eousness and humbly depend on the merits of Jesus; 
that he might be rich in Christ. He spoke of him as 
poor and helpless, and asked God to give him Para- 
dise out of his abundant grace and pity. The descrip- 
tion was of a pauper who deserved nothing; but who 
begged ; and got his friends to beg for him. 



CHARACTER. 159 

After the prayer they sang the hymn: 

Just as I am, without one plea, 
But that thy blood was shed for me. 

And then came the catechising. " Brother, do you 
trust in Jesus?" " I trust I do." "Do you see your lost 
condition out of him?" "I do." "Do you see the folly 
of all your efforts to save yourself by moral Hying and 
righteousness?" "I do." " Is Christ all sufficient ?" 
" He is." " Do you see yourself as a miserable depend- 
ent on God's bounty?" " I do." " Are you willing to 
go?" "I am." And they all stood around won- 
dering and exclaiming at the glorious testimony of 
their dying brother. And when he was gone, they 
spoke of his signal triumph and the holy example of 
faith. Not one word about character. He must dis- 
tinctly ignore and trample on his manhood. It did 
not seem to enter into their idea at all of religion that 
it was to make a man grand and noble and worthy in 
God's eyes. The end was to get into Paradise. The 
man was not a pauper in character by any means. He 
had lived on the whole a good life, and it was not a 
thing to be ashamed of. There was no occasion for 
him to sneak into heaven with a lie in his hand. Not 
long since I had a sharp controversy with a preacher 
over the case of a young man of remarkable moral 
worth. If you count character, he has a peculiarly 
large amount of moral determination, uprightness, gen- 
erosity, industry, purity, a will to help others, a desire 
to know the truth and a scorn for meanness. All 
would say that he weighs heavy from that point 
of view. But he is not a church member; is not a 
believer in the scheme of salvation; is not converted. 
And this preacher wished to convert him; a thing I 
should not like to see done. I should consider it a 
great moral disaster; for this is about the only really 
noble young man in town. I said to the converter, 



160 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

Will yon tell me what you wish to change in 
him? " O, nothing in particular, but you know 
he cannot be saved without faith in the blood of 
Jesus. 1 ' But, I said, he is saved now. He has lost 
very little of his chances, his physical and intellectual 
opportunities. He has saved his brain from tobacco, 
and shallow literature and nonsense. He has saved 
his character. What has he lost? "But he is a 
sinner before God and needs condemnation and needs 
pardon." My good friend, I said, that is all parrotol- 
ogy, and you know it. What do you condemn in the 
lad ? What do you want him to be sorry for ? "1 want 
him to be sorry for rejecting the Savior." But I un- 
derstand that he does not reject the Savior, but is ex- 
tremely glad to get help from any source. Jesus, too, 
has helped him as a grand character. But he wound 
up the argument by the positive assertion "that charac- 
ter was valueless at the judgment day; that there faith 
and blood were requisite, or hell would be the conse- 
quence." But what a grand chance there will be for 
hell if such men are sent there. As Father Taylor, 
the orthodox missionary in Boston, said: "If Emer- 
son is sent to hell it will change the climate." 

Going home in the cars recently, an orthodox friend 
labored earnestly to bring me to a saving conviction 
of my errors. Not prospering satisfactorily in his 
logic, he closed by a solemn assertion that he should 
make me an object of prayer. I said, that does not 
alarm me as much as if I were living when prayers 
and bonfires went together. If prayers will ennoble 
me and strengthen my character, I shall be grateful 
for them ; but if they only aim to appease God's wrath 
for me I do not need them. 

Character does not seem to be the object of popular 
religion. Addressing a vast assembly of Sunday- 
school children in St. Louis, Rev. Dr. Brooks took 
me to task violently because there was no Christian- 



CHARACTER. 161 

ity in my remarks. I had talked to them about the 
advantage of being noble and trusted and generous. 
That, it seemed, would make good citizens but 
not good saints. To me there is more piety in 
Johnny, who, having picked out of the gutter a piece of 
rotten apple, gave Billy a bite. Billy, dear boy, was 
careful not to take too much. But Johnny pushed it 
back and said, "Bite bigger, Billy." There was more 
salvation there between those two half-starved little 
fellows, than in a whole Sunday-school singing, " I 
want to be an angel." I wish I might hear all the 
Sunday-schools singing: 

I want to be a man, 

And with the men stand; 
With brains inside my forehead, 

A book within my hand. 

A book, a hoe, or anything else but an angel harp. 

Huxley says he wants a science Sunday-school in 
every parish. Well, the result would be character, 
but it might not be faith. 

Will you carefully consider what is the real result of 
Sunday-school literature and Sunday-school theology. 
Are the results palpable in the way of positive strength 
of character, or even in a deposit of truth to make 
character? I hear a good many hymns about Golden 
Shores, and Shining Sands, and Going Home; and 
a good deal of instruction about mythical history; 
but I am sure that these children had better have a 
few veritable facts about ants, bees and flowers. I am 
certain that they had better have a practical lesson of 
industry with the shovel or the hoe than these silly or 
even blasphemous lessons about the supernatural and 
about Heaven. But it is breaking the Sabbath to lead 
them to do a little toward making Heaven here; it is 
piety to teach them to sing about a Heaven hereafter. 
Give us by all means a Scientific Sunday-school. I 
assure you you may look out for a very different use of 



J 62 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

Sunday before long — a very practical sort of day it 
will be, full of character making. 

A minister , hard pressed the other day, said: "Yes, I 
suppose more could be saved by scientific study and ap- 
pliances, by microscopes and a general interest 
awakened in the world about them than can be saved 
by our church methods — that is, they could be saved 
from bad habits and a waste of time, from low 
tastes and all that, but how about the next life?" So 
he could see character framed and a nobler manhood, 
but that did not seem to be salvation. They still had 
to meet a God with whom such righteousness is filthy 
rags. "But," said the investigator, " you might at least 
give a part of the time to science — say moral science; 
biology and psychology, or even religious history." 
' k Yes, we might," was the reply, "but to tell the truth 
we don't know enough about such things." The training 
to preach has never taken in a knowledge of this world. 
Chemistry and botany, etc., etc., are secular studies. 
Religious studies are the science of preaching the holy 
scriptures; church history; harmony of the gospels; 
the history of doctrine. So the whole Christian min- 
istry is impelled to follow the routine of getting can- 
didates ready for judgment. 

I open the book of discipline of a church that in 
many respects is worthy of honor ; and I read that: "We 
have no desire to get up simply a large church, but we 
do hope that our societies will be composed exclusively 
of those *who are in earnest to gain heaven, and who 
are determined by the grace of God to live up to the 
requirements of the Bible." This is a blunt way of 
stating it; but it is not so blunt as the way it is acted. 
My dear brethren, heaven is not a decent motive for 
an honest soul. You must abolish it. 

I met the other day one of the dearest and best men 
I ever knew; a child's warm heart inside the prickliest 
sort of stubborn determination. One of those men 



CHARACTER. 163 

that live on our hillsides, who have grand characters, 
grander than the grand valleys full of railroads and 
villages that they look down on. He is orthodox, but 
he said: " I am sick of this business. I wish I could 
find a Quaker church near by; I would join it. They 
make character." " Yes," I said, " but they do not keep 
your Sunday, nor eat your sacraments, nor believe in 
the Trinity." But they make character, while the church 
will sell out morals for money and let down the stand- 
ard of manhood for a crown. I am heart-sick. Yes, 
I would like to get in with the honest, true, just and 
peaceful Quakers. 

But this mischievous depreciation of character is 
not by any means confined to orthodoxy. Only there 
it is a system. 

The difficulty pointed out is even more aggravated 
among a good many who are not orthodox. They are 
emotionalists of the worst type. They have in view 
that ridiculous heaven called liberty. Everything is 
attained when they are free to let their tongues wag. 
But there is one eternal and universal moral law, that 
nothing but truth will make a man free. The worst 
slave in the world is the silly victim of an empty head. 
The two ends of life are to know and to be; and being 
is invariably dependent on knowing. 

Perhaps I never have comprehended this matter, 
but it seems to me the end of all preaching and the 
end of all teaching is not to say a few good things, 
but to build character, to inspire men to better living, 
and strengthen them in all wise ways. The end of 
family life is not sweetness, but strength. Many a 
kind mother is leaving her children characterless on 
the positive side, and therefore entirely open to 
temptation when temptation comes. For my part I 
will not make a choice between that honey dew which 
is distilled by radical pulpits about God's love, and 
that gall which comes from the other side about His 



164 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

hate. I should starve on the mild sweetness, and be 
poisoned with the bitterness. "What we want is study, 
very positive use of the materials about us, to make 
us valuable. There are two things needed, (1.) To 
train the mind to use data or facts; and (2.) To collect 
the facts to use. I meet a great many liberals who 
have some cleverness, but no industry — they are moral 
louts. They will die, and the world will be not a whit 
the better for them. I do not mean those intellectual 
loafers who have not even honesty, who pilfer others' 
work and roll around like a ship in a trough, liable to 
shoot off hither and just as liable thither. I mean 
those really sincere men whose emotions are liberal, 
but whose thoughts are not, because they have none. 
Now you can convert a Methodist, or you can convert 
Methodism; and converted Methodism is emotional 
liberality. It shouts glory when superstition is weak- 
ened ; but it knows nothing of the age or of thought 
except its instinct. I have a friend who is constantly 
enlightening me on liberal matters ; but the man is miles 
in the rear of the world's radical work. Such men are 
liable to be victims of some crude reformism, some 
notion, some excessive folly of liberalism. They have 
no vice, no bigotry ; but no character. 

Buddha used to close up his lectures to his followers 
with these words: "But we must be willing to learn." 
Jesus used to say at the close of his stirring sermons: 
"He that has ears let him hear." Hoping is an empty 
cheat without learning. Freedom is a fetter of stout 
silk ropes, only it is freedom to study. 

Now with the idea of heaven wholly left out and the 
next life forgotten, the true problem appears to be how 
to make of ourselves right characters, so that we shall 
be right and do right for the sake of the right; and be 
happy in doing honorably because it is honorable, and 
because we should be ashamed before our souls to be 
dishonorable. 



CHARACTER. 165 

But this business of ignoring character is not con- 
fined to the church. I find the schools largely work- 
ing on the same basis. If there be any one fact more 
patent than another concerning our public school sys- 
tem it is this, that the end of education is considered 
to be intellectual entirely. So far as a reasonable 
amount of facts are concerned, the young doubtless 
get them; but how to use these facts for the public 
welfare, or for private ennoblement, is not a matter of 
direct training. Our boys lack moral will. They are 
not under training to be made into noble beings, but 
to be professional preachers, lawyers and doctors, or 
else skillful mechanics. All well so far as it goes ; but 
it does not go far enough. These products will sell 
out for a price; these products do not comprehend the 
great moral laws of nature. When you teach my boy 
the gravity of matter, I want him also to know the 
equally certain gravity of moral life ; that the soul that 
sins dies ; that every degree of badness is death. And 
I will curse you if you teach my boy that he can sell 
his manhood and yet at last be saved by the righteous- 
ness of somebody else. 

Have I said that there are not many noble, gener- 
ous, beautiful characters that are graduated from our 
schools and our churches. If I even implied that, I 
will take it back ; but the} are not perceptibly the pro- 
duct of the schools and churches. The only character 
builder in our civilization is home. Where you get a 
wise father and a wise mother you will get noble chil- 
dren and noble citizens in spite of all other hindrances. 

After town-meeting last week a prominent clergy- 
man said, What a sight it is — these faces at a town- 
meeting — the people. They are so coarse, so brutish ! 
Yes, I said, but why, and what will you do about it? 
Men are products. These men are the product of 
what? Evidently of your schools and your churches. 
But you cannot do much better on the plan you work; 



166 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

you cannot preach this low life out of them. You 
cannot pray it out. If you have weeds you will hoe 
all summer, and be beaten in the end. Plant corn ; cul- 
tivate character. Give these men something to think 
about that will inspire them. "Yes, but so I do," he 
replies; "I preach Jesus Christ and him crucified, the 
only way of salvation." But you see salvation does 
not come. Your topic is worn threadbare ; men do not 
hear your clock tick; it has ticked so exactly so long. 
"Well, but we have song services." Yes, a little ritual 
helps. But mark it that you must have a full ritual 
or none at all. The Catholics and High Churchmen 
get the crowds. But they do not make character. 

Ritualism is a machine for saving decrepit rascality 
from final condemnation, and securing it a bunk in 
Paradise. It has a heaven full of trash — more than 
any old museum or garret. Now what you want is to 
make nobler faces on nobler men at your town meet- 
ings. Yes, well you can't do it by preaching; you 
have been at that 1800 years. Men grow nobler only 
by widening their environments, give them larger 
views of the universe, of life, and- of man ; and just in 
that proportion you will save them. Till a man dis- 
covers the great God in himself he is always purchas- 
able. But when he hears within a voice uttering the 
great laws of the moral universe he becomes at last 
owner of himself. Whatever temptation comes, the 
God within cries: It is I that am greater than all pur- 
chase money. Will they give you office if you bow 
down and worship, I say you shall gain much, but lose 
your soul. Will they that you conform to their lies, 
religious or social? I say you shall be deceived if 
you deceive. 

If you will study all great characters you will find 
the key of their power just where you find that of 
Spinoza. He said: " Neither now nor ever will I sell 
the smallest of my convictions for material good." 



CHARACTER. 167 

The temptations tolcl of Jesus are truths at the thresh- 
old of every man's life. The devil of greed or false 
pleasures or shams stands by us and asks for our wor- 
ship. The answers given by the conqueror are those 
said to have been given by Jesus; manhood cannot 
thrive on bread alone, nor on wealth and honors and 
purchasable pleasures. 

What now is the real road of salvation. How will 
you go to work to save souls? Why, plainly not by get- 
ting them to assent to your creed but by increasing 
their moral power. 

I get a hint of capital value of this sort: 

Leigh Hunt, superintendent of schools in Des Moines, 
has adopted a plan of giving practical instruction in 
earning and saving money. In the first place, he en- 
couraged children to open bank accounts, and to learn 
how to do business at a bank. Boys with, rich fathers, 
boys with poor fathers, and boys without fathers or 
mothers, are incited to earn money in honest ways. 
They black boots, deliver papers, shovel snow from 
sidewalks and carry in coal. Not a few are learning 
trades during odd hours, and many have tools with 
which they work at home. Those who are doing 
mechanical work that requires considerable skill, 
meet and compare the articles they have made. There 
is a friendly rivalry to see who will have the largest 
bank account and furnish the best specimens of handi- 
work The work out of school is said to have good 
effect on the work done in the school. The boys are 
getting a reputation for thrift, skill and economy, as 
well as for scholarship. 

So you see, at last, what character is. It is what 
each one has in proportion to his heredity, and his 
surroundings, and finally his choices, It is the one 
thing to save. 

Now let me by an illustration show how false is that 
salvation which considers anything but character. I 



168 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

lay my watch down in the street. Horses come down 
the way with carriages. It is liable to be trodden 
upon every moment. A wheel now breaks off the stem. 
An ox cart rolls directly over it. I stand by and see 
it done. I do not even try to save it. At last it is 
ground into gold dust. Its value is only to be worked 
over into some other mechanism. The watch is gone. 
Meanwhile one after another have come along and said: 
"What are you doing?" "Why don't you save your 
watch?" "Save it!" I cry. "Why man, I expect the 
maker of that watch along by and by, and he will 
save it by a new process, called atonement. I know 
that watch is gone. It was a poor affair at best, but 
the maker will take the poor refuse and call it a watch, 
and it will be all right." " But the watch is spoiled, 
you fool; you have thrown away your property." 
"Never yon mind," I say; " have you never heard of 
the theory of substitution? The maker will treat that 
watch as if it were all right. This is the way he will 
work. He will put another watch down in the street 
and when the wheels come near he will not let them 
run over that; and after it has lain there long enough 
and had its casing torn off he will pick up both watches 
and say: Now because this watch is all right, I will 
call that all right — and it will be all right." The 
rightness of this one will be attributed to that one. 
Its running ability is imputed to that one. And then 
half a dozen of you join hands on the sidewalk and 
sing, Salvation, O, Salvation. The joyful news pro- 
claim. But common sense says that watch is not saved. 
So it is with character. The only salvation of a man 
is to save his moral power, his Tightness, and his ten- 
dency toward rightness. Your scheme of imputed 
righteousness applied to a spoiled man is at the bot- 
tom, childishness. It is calling a crockery doll a 
statesman or a queen. You tell me of a great scheme 
of salvation whereby at death a man, bad to the last 



CHARACTER. 169 

moment, may be saved by the Tightness of another. 
You tell me God says, "Believe in Jesus and I will 
impute his Tightness to you;" and you will be as 
if you had not let the wheels run over you. You will 
be as if you had never sold yourself for gain. 

Nature takes a different view of these things. She 
imputes no soundness to rotten things. She tumbles 
down weak trees and works them over. 

How is it really- with man? Ami any way judged by 
my neighbor as right by substitution? Plead that at 
the bar of justice. " Yes, I stole the horse, but my 
neighbor was with me. He endured the temptation. 
He opposed me. He pleaded with me. He suffered all 
night. He prays for me. He has superabundant Tight- 
ness. I plead him. I am not right; he is. O, Judge, 
he pleads for me. For his sake pronounce me guilt- 
less." The judge will be perjured if he does. I am 
guilty — and no decision to the contrary can change 
facts. But God can do as he chooses in his court. 
He can call me guiltless on account of Jesus. He can 
apply Jesus' goodness to*jne if he will ; and so my sins 
that are as scarlet, shall be white as snow. No, he 
cannot. He can do nothing of the kind. The broader 
man's vision, the more exact must be his moral decis- 
ion. God is, above all, bound to be just and true. 
Your substitution scheme is a great lie. No honest 
God could act in it. And what difference though God 
should thunder through all the universe: You are right- 
eous. You will be every whit just what you are by 
your choices. Your character is your measure. 

So you see again it comes to this, that' the problem 
of life is to establish and save character. A man says, 
"Here am I; I John! with certain advantages and 
powers. I am offered a high honor if I will yield my 
honest convictions concerning certain lies. I can gain 
a large income, wide honor among my fellows. It is 
a good price. I will sell." But the poor fellow does 



170 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

not know the end of his bargain. His character is 
what he sold ; he will never again be able to say, "I am 
myself; T own myself, I believe what I know." He is 
a liar for a price. He will lie now to himself. He 
will excuse evil. He will reap the dishonor of his fellows. 
When Alexander Stephens was supposed to be dying, a 
minister said, "Mr. Stephens, if you do not object, I 
will read a chapter in the Bible and we will have 
prayer." "I do object most decidedly," said the man 
of character. "I have no objection to prayer, but I 
am no better to-day on my death bed than I have tried 
to be every day of my life. I have no special prepara- 
tions to make, and no special pleas to offer." He knew 
that he had his character and nothing else. 

Now you must be particular to follow me very 
closely for a few moments, for this is the all important 
question, how to ennoble man — how to make character. 

Absolute freedom, no man has. Free choice is the 
direction we take under the influence of past experi- 
ences. In the insect or animal this becomes a fixed 
drift of determination ; so thai what seems freedom and 
thought is only the sheerest bondage. The bee must 
make honey. He not only can make his hexagonal 
cells of wax, but he must make them. Now man is 
simply a being of the same sort, inheriting biases, but 
so many and so complicated as to create not only a 
necessity to do certain things, but one more necessity, 
that is a necessity of choice which of several things he 
will do. The highest animals manifest a degree of 
this same higher compulsion. But man both by hered- 
ity, and by the vast changes and variety of his envi- 
ronments, becomes so much under necessity of choice 
that we scantily recognize his compulsion at all. You 
are inclined to define him as the creature of free will. 
But if you study men under some conditions this is 
less apparent. The Celt many thousands of years ago 
came west to Ireland. For thousands of years his con- 



CHARACTER. 171 

dition has been one of bondage to foreign powers and 
one of subjection to landlords. His environments for 
a dozen generations have not changed at all. His 
heredity has become a fixed flow. He has forgotten 
choice of the higher sort. He can do only what he 
has inherited to do. It will take several generations of 
changed surroundings and multiplied experiences to 
bring him up to free choice. Put him where you will 
he is a slave to his constituted instincts. The same is 
true of the Southern slave in a modified wav; for 
slavery really delivered the negro from a previous con- 
dition of lower instinct. 

Now to get at the King Lear idea of character we 
must observe that man in his larger brain power has 
taken into his estimates his relations to other beings, 
and his choice with this consideration we call moral 
choice. His character becomes a moral character. In 
this estimate he considers his family and friends-^- 
perhaps his tribe, perhaps his nation; and then we 
call him a patriot. A larger heredity and more brain 
cells in use begets at last men of larger moral choice, 
men who leap over sect bounds and national * bounds 
and are real philanthropists. The same tendency 
works inwardly as well as outwardly. The man is 
more moral toward himself. His idea of selfhood is 
nobler. He will not waste or damage himself; his 
own conscience is the judgment seat of choice. His 
God, instead of being a mean and selfish force that he 
conjures to help him to some selfish ends or out of 
responsibility, becomes a power of a universal sort, to 
whom it would be a crime to appeal in a selfish way. 
God is simply the operative conscience of the universe. 
So you see by a rational process moral character devel- 
ops. Here is character; the larger the environments 
the larger the development of character. Consider the 
change I referred to in the Celt in Ireland. His 
environments are a hut, a meager diet, a fixed employ- 



172 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

meat, a narrow vision without travel, no book vision, 
few social pleasures, no mental or moral stimulus, his 
religion mainly a ritual ; his hopes alone, being quick- 
ened by his creed, keep him from steady degeneration. 
On the other hand there is the scientist across the 
Channel. What are his environments? He has a 
home made of the choicest products of all ages and 
all lands; art that involves the thought of Greece, 
Italy and France; music that is the result of all the 
Mozarts and Haydns since man first blew his trumpet. 
His garden has plants and fruits from every quarter 
of the globe — the result of a commerce that has been 
ever widening. His table is spread with the morning 
news that calls in the service of the telegraph and rail- 
road and steamship. His food is the result of the choice 
and wisdom that we wrap up in hygiene. His labora- 
tory is the field of experiment where he analyzes new 
worlds of soil, air and light. The telescope and spec- 
troscope bear him out to stars and suns and milky 
ways of universes. His environments are a universe 
of worlds. The contrasts between him and his neigh- 
bors are almost too extreme to leave them classed 
together as men. The moral power of the one is little 
above the beast; that of the other is nearly that of a 
God. Freedom is proportioned to environments. So 
also is responsibility. Nature is steadily working 
toward the production of character. The question is 
forced on man as he rises to choose between a larger 
range of purposes and plans, and morally to recognize 
his widening relations. And all the time self becomes 
a grander value. His inner life is as much larger as 
his outer. What, says Jesus proudly, would it profit me 
to gain the whole world and lose my soul ? The soul 
is the product of all this mighty change. Salvation is 
no longer the hope of the Celt to get free from toils 
and into a place of rest; but it is to secure enlarged 
ranges of work and thought. It is to intensify self 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE. 1*73 

power and moral choice. Salvation is to secure even 
larger environments and more responsibility. Heaven 
is only more superb activity. See now the soul escapes 
now from hereditary bondage. It cannot make the cell 
of a bee, but it need not. It can choose. It can make 
implements of choice. It can think in spite of environ- 
ments. It can break bonds of slaves and rise above 
environments. This is the final man. 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTUKE. 

We hear often the expression, " Religion of the 
Future," as if a new religion were about to supplant 
the religion of the past and present. Eventually all 
religions are one. We speak of The Ten Great Re- 
ligions of Earth, or of the Vedic, the Persian, the 
Christian Religion, as of separate faiths. The relig- 
ions are based on the same great fundamental wants 
in human nature and the same discovered truths. 

Man has been defined to be a religious animal. The 
idea man, involves the idea God. It is an idea always 
begotten wherever there is a man. However you de- 
fine religion it certainly involves the consideration of 
powers outside of ourselves. The first man must have 
judged of nature as we do. Wherever man went the 
religion of nature was about him, the interrogation of 
nature was within him. As men wandered oat in dif- 
ferent directions over the world they changed their 
views, precisely as they changed their language. 
Speech changed in form, but at the bottom it was 
an attempt to express their wants vocally. After a 
while the changes were so great that different tribes 
could not understand each other ; yet, they all under- 
stood this — that vocal sounds were intended to express 
ideas. The Aryan knew that the Turanian wished to 



174 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

tell him what he thought. So religion changed in 
every direction, but it was still everywhere a yearning 
to express hope, wish, love, awe, reverence, fear. It 
was his relation to the Infinite that man recognized. 
He was a child of some one with a nature like his own. 
His ideas were vague, doubtless, but so are religious 
ideas in these times. Very few were gifted as poets, 
very few with deep religious insight. 

Gross minds must get into gross ways of understand- 
ing nature. Tribes that under the pinch of war and 
poverty, and unhealthy climate, were being degraded, 
would carry their religion down with them. Other 
tribes, going up in the scale of life and comfort, would 
carry their religion up with them. So, in time, you got 
men who could only count ten and worship accordingly ; 
and men who could calculate eclipses,worshiping accord- 
ingly. The first men whose notions about God we 
hear from were Abraham, or Brahm, and some very 
fine old Egyptians. Their ideas were grand and good 
— good enough in many ways for to-day. They called 
God Father, they hated idolatry, they called themselves 
upward lookers. 

Do not understand me to say that I believe a grand 
religion of nature was given to man at the outset any 
more than a complicated language. I mean simply, 
that at the outset man found nature with his brains and 
he thought and felt according to his brain power; and 
he has always done so since. Underneath all so-called 
revealed religions, there are certain natural elements, 
and the supernatural is only a natural ambition to sus- 
tain our notions by high authority. 

I suspect that all that was meant by inspiration 
originally, was, simply, that some men were spoken of 
as so high-souled that you might say they talked with 
God. No one undertook to claim literal conversation 
with Deity, or that the Infinite Being gave him abso- 
lute truth. But these high authorities were afterward 



THE RELIGION" OF THE EUTURE. 175 

exalted by stupid souls into beings to whom God re- 
vealed himself miraculously. 

All real religion, is, therefore, the religion of na- 
ture; and this is a varying term in different ages and 
different lands. The religion of nature is what nature 
teaches to the Chinaman, what she teaches to the Pata- 
gonian or to the Englishman. It is what Emerson hears 
when he looks over Boston Harbor, or what Kearney 
hears when he looks over the Bay of San Francisco. 
It is what any one of a hundred men get from looking 
into the night skies of this bright starred month. No 
two will certainly get the same lesson or inspiration; 
because by no two is the universe seen exactly alike. 
The old-time Persians and the old-time Hindoos and 
the old-time Egyptians each had their religion from 
nature, but their theological notions were remarkably 
varied. 

So, then, by the religion of nature we mean not what 
a fool or a child gathers from nature, what the first 
man gathered, but the truths that all men have gath- 
ered, interpreted by the best knowledge of nature. 

And by nature we mean not only stars and suns, 
trees, flowers, mountains and oceans and the laws of 
a material universe, but human nature as well; for 
man and man's soul and man's hopes, aspirations, con- 
victions and works are natural. The facts and laws 
of mind and the facts and laws of matter, both come 
under the head of science. There is a science of mind 
and a science of matter. 

When men, therefore, inquire what is natural relig- 
ion, they mean what is the religion taught by matter 
outside of us, and by our souls. 

Now, one step farther. Are there not some special 
and fundamental lessons of nature spoken in all ages 
and to all men? You may call them inveterate truths, 
or truths of consciousness. But studying men every- 
where, is there any uniformity of religious conviction 



176 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

to which we can refer as common human property? 
In mathematics all nations have said twice one are 
two, and a whole is greater than a part. Some savages 
there are who cannot comprehend even this simple 
computation; but they are not considered as human 
exceptions. We class them as dehumanized. So all 
nations with the same kind of exceptions have inter- 
preted nature so as to say: There is a moral law; there 
is a God. Obligation comes from existence. Man ought 
to avoid certain deeds. We ought to do to others as 
we would they should do to us. To break a law of 
nature is sin; sin leads to misery, obedience leads to 
peace. So all languages give us axioms of right liv- 
ing ; they are not revelations, unless there have been a 
thousand revelations. Decalogues were never written 
by a God's finger on stone, but they are translations of 
an old manuscript called "the soul of man." The 
finer teachings of Buddha were not his by discovery. 
The Lord's Prayer was in use in all its clauses long 
before Jesus. It can be found in the Talmud of the 
Jews, and in part in the Vedas of the Hindoos. u Do 
to others as ye would have them do to you" was said 
by Confucius five hundred years before Jesus, and by 
Hillel one hundred before. It was not supernatural, 
but natural. There is not a thought that takes hold 
upon life and makes us nobler, or upon the soul and 
saves it, that has not been noticed by dozens of upward 
lookers in diverse eras. 

After you sift a religion thoroughly you will find 
the only purely original thiug about it, the only thing 
not natural, to be its theology and its ceremonial. All 
of its morals, its virtues, its real value, are the voice of 
the divine world to the soul of all men. If anything 
is claimed to be supernaturally revealed, it is such 
doctrines as Trinity, Man's original holiness, his pres- 
ent original sin, his creation, the origin of worlds, 
atonement by bloodshed, and then a schedule of 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE. 11*7 

prayers, sacrifices, washings, kneelings, fastings. 
These things are everywhere unique. They, when 
added on to natural religion, make the subdivisions 
which are often elevated to front rank and entitled the 
Hebrew religion, the Chinese religion, the Christian 
religion; whereas these religions are one, except in 
these superadded and peculiar notions which no one 
can prove except by saying they were revealed by 
superior beings. The Christian tells you that God did 
reveal in old times to certain men certain facts which 
he did not or could not reveal to all men through 
nature. Yet all men are vastly affected by these very 
half-revealed truths. The religion of nature, every 
man gets according to the measure of his ability and 
need. The religion supernatural, no man gets except 
by chance of locality. 

The battling as you see then, the quarreling, is alto- 
gether between professed revelations. The pious mur- 
dering has all been done by supernaturalism. The 
degradation of manhood to monkey and brutality has 
not been by natural religion, but in the name of cer- 
tain professed facts above nature. 

But in one sense these supernatural notions and per- 
formances come under the head of natural. Before 
science gets at the facts and laws of nature by careful 
examination, before telescopes, spectroscopes and after 
appliances help us out into the field of the Infinite, 
men speculate crudely upon nature. Besides the few 
fundamental moral lessons they get a vast amount of 
notions that constitute superstition. This is child sci- 
ence. My boy speaks of the moon as going to bed; of 
the sun as lazy; of the sky as a place above the air 
where the birds fly. The savage is only like the child ; 
his science is therefore childish and superstitious. He 
imagines gods of specific form, and many of them. 
The sun is his God; the hero dead go to the stars. 
The gods go to war; some of them are beaten and fail. 



1*78 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

The difference between this kind of science and the 
advanced science of the higher schools of enlightened 
times is nicely expressed in the two words superstition 
and understanding: superstition, from super and sians, 
means to stand over and look down at a thing ; under- 
standing, or standing under, means to get right down 
under a thing and pry it up and see it from all sides. 
Superstition is then half looking at a thing, it is half 
science, It is natural in so far" as better methods are 
not understood. 

Now what do we do in chemistry when we get along 
so far with the science as to perceive that false chem- 
istry has been believed; why we even laugh at Lord 
Bacon's crude experiments. In astronomy we say the 
system of Ptolemy was a grand mistake. The world is 
not flat, it does not rest on old Atlas' shoulders; it 
does not rest on a tortoise and that on a coiled serp- 
ent. But what do we do in religion? We say cer- 
tainly, three times one makes three; but then as to 
God it is revealed that three times one makes one; we 
say that Jesus certainly was born and ate and drank 
and acted and died as a man ; but it was revealed to 
somebody that he was God, therefore we must not 
believe what we see or judge, but what is revealed. 
We find that miracles are very slippery in these days 
— and occur just when the observers are least likely to 
thoroughly test them ; but a few miracles have been 
revealed to be supernatural, and therefore we must not 
believe the evidence of this age and the light, but must 
credit what is revealed; and lest we fail of doing this 
we are warned of most terrific penalties. If, on the 
other hand, we do believe, we are offered extraordinary 
and undeserved bribes. 

Rationalism is denounced as setting up reason 
against authority, our reasons against God's word. 
Natural religion is sneered at as a crude affair that 
belongs to savages. But we find that, after all, natural 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE. 179 

religion is nothing of the sort. The natural religion 
of to-day is that religion and that theology which comes 
from the high, broad grasp of nature, given us by this 
age of natural science. It is the voice of Huxley, 
Darwin, Asa Gray, Agassiz, Carpenter, and those men 
who best understand the realm above us and the realm 
within us. 

Natural religion to-day is the summary of all the 
research of modern times. Natural religion is pro- 
gressive with the times. It supposes man gathering 
from nature more and more of truth, and richer as he 
gathers. When you think of the religion of nature you 
think of a savage worshiping a fetish ; but I think of 
Huxley in his laboratory, Tyndall with his pupils ; Fara- 
day lecturing on a candle ; Agassiz catching fishes to 
teach comparative anatomy; Liebig with his scales. 
Natural religion of to-day means what the most 
enlightened reason reads in nature. Nature includes 
God and law and conscience, and reason and man. 

The naturalist also modestly says that we have not 
more than begun to find out, not only facts and laws, but 
the religion of facts and laws. The super naturalist says 
that God did make known all his will through certain 
men, and that is never to be amended; it is in his 
book. The naturalist says, I know that God is speak ■ 
ing and always will speak, and that his last word will 
be as weighty as his first. The supernaturalist says, 
Your whole duty is to read the revealed will. The 
naturalist says the sublimest duty of man is to listen 
to the serene tones of divine truth that will never be 
silent while the stars are singing and souls are hop- 
ing. The supernaturalist says you must save your 
soul by believing in this book; what believed any- 
where else would dub you idiotic. The naturalist says 
what is absurd and impossible inherently can not be 
made reasonable and possible, though God should 
assert it. Newton stands on the verge of death and 



180 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

says: "All so far is but pebbles on the shore." Jona- 
than Edwards stands in the middle of a New Eng- 
land puddle and says: "Behold the infinite ocean, I 
have fathomed it; I have measured it." Prof. Young 
stands beside the Harvard Refractor and millions of suns 
blaze in upon his consciousness, yet he says: "Behold, 
I know not, only this I know, that the new Jerusalem 
of God into which the enlightened soul enters is Infin- 
ite, Infinite, Infinite." But the supernaturalist sends 
his angels up and down the sides of it and he says: 
" The new Jerusalem is 12,000 furlongs square and 
the wall of it is 144 cubits." 

I am now ready to answer the question: "What is 
to be the religion of the future?" Not your sect nor 
mine; not Protestantism any more than Catholicism; 
not Christianity any more than Buddhism; not Uni- 
tarianism any more than Trinitarianism, but it is to 
be a growth and expansion of natural religion unloaded 
of supernatural dogmatism and revealed theology — 
what God really has said in your soul or mine, in that 
of Paul or Plato, of Jesus or of Socrates, will be 
tested by the light of nature and either rejected or 
retained as it shall stand the light. 

The paraphernalia of salvation which now stands out 
as a scheme of God to save our souls will be relegated 
to the company of those charms which the Huns of 
Attila bring about their dirty necks to save them from 
Roman slingers. Luther tried to drive off the devil 
by saying over Bible phrases ; but the devil laughed ; 
finally Luther laughed at him and the devil vanished. 
We are coming into the laughing age. It is bad for 
devils and all sorts of revelations and atonements that 
they do not endure laughter. 

AH stories that are only a bit of historical statement 
out of Hindoo or Hebrew archives will be tested as his- 
tory; and no man thought the worse for disbelieving 
their divine origin. If Bancroft could write so good a 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE. 181 

history as he has of the United States, it would not 
need God to write so poor a history as that of the 
Jews. The religion of the future will then be emanci- 
pated from the necessity of giving credence to such 
divine performances as are recorded in the twenty-four 
books of Homer or the five books of Moses. 

You ask: What do you mean by the future? Do 
you mean to prophesy a rapid downfall of all standing 
religions and the establishment of one on a broader 
basis at any particular time ? Not at all. We shall 
only grow, grow constantly a little more rapidly in the 
line I have indicated. There is to-day in Christendom 
more natural religion than supernatural. Almost all 
great names must be struck off church-rolls; they are 
natural religionists. We shall never date back to the 
year of the establishment of natural Theism, for it has 
always existed. No great, new religion can be looked 
for, but an expansion of the old ones. The tendency 
is to a fraternizing of all existing faiths. You can 
hardly find a Protestant to-day who will not call the 
Catholic church a part of the Christian church. Cath- 
olics do not deny in private that you and I have very 
good tickets for paradise. The progress may be slow, 
but you must remember that growth is a matter of cir- 
cumstances. I set my geraniums in my conservatory, 
and all winter they do little more than exist; in May I 
plant them on my lawn, and in one week they have 
done more growing and blossoming than in six months 
before. The last twenty years has accomplished almost 
as much toward humanizing religion and delivering it 
of supernaturalism as two hundred years before. Cath- 
olics are vastly more Protestants than John Calvin and 
Martin Luther were. The bishops have to be careful 
how they lay hands on the individual liberty of the 
churches ; we are not any longer a flock of sheep to be 
driven by a shepherd. I think most good Christians 
would prefer to be classed in these days as goats; they 



182 LIBEETY AND LIFE. 

like to butt something. j*. man finds something very 
suggestive in the fact that sheep are mainly kept to be 
shorn ; the goat is typical of freedom. 

Here, then, you see the value of what I have sometimes 
called comparative theology or comparative religion. 
We study the Vedas and the old Persian doctrines, not 
to find something better than Christianity, but because 
we find there the same germs of truth that we do here. 
This generation has been amazed, in getting at the old 
heathen faiths, to find that they were neither the work 
of devils, nor of beings at all unlike Moses and Jesus. 
We have found that just as soon as you get rid of the 
supernatural everywhere you get at certain common 
truths of nature. Man has always been man; God has 
always been God; Man means an inspirational being, 
God means an inspirer; man can't well help himself, 
and God must. God is the sayer, the voice or word of 
eternity; man is the ear. 

"Is not Christianity the best after all?" Why, 
yes, my orthodox friend, it is a great deal the best in 
some respects and on the whole, because it has most of 
natural religion in it. Jesus was the most natural 
teacher of religion that you can find. Instead of being 
supernatural there is a great deal more reason for 
thinking Moses or Buddha were. Jesus is man all 
over; he talks about nature all the time. There is no 
such natural religion in the world as the " Sermon on 
the Mount." He was also most humanitarian or 
human. To physical nature and human nature Jesus 
was very close; Christianity at the outset was a revolt 
from supernatural ism to natural religion; Jesus never 
undertook to teach revelation. There are no dogmas 
in his teachings; his religion was love, not obedience; 
He erred in making his religion too entirely human. 

But our supernaturalists fail to see that when they 
claim for Christianity that it is best they give up the 
question. If best, only, then another is good and 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE. 183 

another is better; this best is only a question of com- 
parison. They seem to think somebody is trying to 
set up Confucianism or Buddhism as better than 
Christianity. All we care for these old faiths is to show 
that they are in the same category with Christianity, 
holding fundamentally the same truths, but with a dif- 
ferent kind of supernatural attachment; one gives us a 
four-headed God, another a two-faced God, while 
Christianity appends a trinity. The only ground these 
men can stand on is that Christianity is the only divine 
revelation, and that all others are human inventions. 
There is no comparison, Christianity is God's word, 
the others are all bastards; or else they are all the 
product of man — as they are. 

Now, if you will cut Christianity loose from Judaism 
first, and then from the decrees of a lot of councils, 
and take it just as it is, you will find why it is best. It 
is not Protestantism that we want but a permanent 
protesting ; Protestantism has as much supernaturalism 
as Catholicism. A protest has always run through 
religious history. Some one has been crying like a 
child for God and the peace of love; and the syna- 
gogues and churches have been always trying to 
feed the hungry souls with stones. If your son ask 
bread will ye give him a stone? Well, yes, Jesue. 
When we ask for a saving religion, for principles that 
will help us to conquer our evil and obey our good 
propensities, they say: "Believe original sin, that 
will do you good; believe total depravity, that will 
make you holy ; believe the trinity, that will keep you 
from lust and liquor; believe in the blood atonement 
and you will be so saintly you will not know yourself; 
believe the inspiration of Moses and you will be almost 
a well man; believe that nearly all your fellow creat- 
ures will be damned, and if that doesn't set well on 
your stomach, why, you will be damned too." 

Is it any wonder a protest has always been heard 



184 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

rumbling through the ages, and occasionally culminat- 
ing io an Abraham, a Jesus, a Mohammed, a Luther, 
a Parker? It is a cry for the bread of nature; the food 
that God stored the earth with when he stored it with 
coal and oil. The protest of to-day is not for the 
natural religion of Adam, but for that of the micro- 
scope, the telescope, the specroscope — not that of the 
cradle of manhood, but that of the ripened thought 
of the 19th century. What we protest against is what 
men have always protested against — supernaturalism. 
The church of the future then will be simply no 
church at all, if by church •you mean an authorized 
exponent of God. A church must always be intoler- 
ant; it is not Catholicism that has done the persecut- 
ing, but churchism. Don't blind yourselves; Catholics 
persecuted, Protestants persecuted; Calvin believed in 
burning those who did not agree with him. State 
churches have burned piles of victims. Puritans per- 
secuted, and to-day local churches ex-communicate 
you — that is, give over your soul to the devil — which 
means damn you for all eternity unless you yield. 
Men are forbidden to preach who will not uphold such 
diabolism. This is legitimate, the church holds God's 
word, it is obligated to defend it. God's voice is 
above all legislation. As the church believes itself to 
hold God's will, it must, in truth and honor, be intoler- 
ant; when it tolerates it has secret infidelity in its loins. 
Channing did not see that there could be no liberty with 
supernatural authority. Parker saw it. Between a divine 
Church and a divine Book there is this difference: A 
church is more pliable to reform ; you can only get rid 
of a book by denying it. You can reform a church ; you 
cannot reform a book, There are no such abject slaves 
in this world as slaves to a printed text. The church 
can pass outrageous laws, but it can rescind them ; not so 
the book. An infallible book involves infallible inter- 
preters, so you get both church and book. A divine 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE. 185 

church can exist alone, not so a divine book. The 
Catholic says you obey Moses, I obey the Pope; you 
follow Jesus and Paul; I follow also Clement and 
Gregory and a host of good Popes. So Orthodoxy is 
only another word for Catholicism ; it means loyalty to 
standards. 

So you see the outlook is not in Protestantism as a 
church or an aggregation of churches. Christianity, 
while the best of religions, is in every phase of it the 
most absolute. It is the most autocratic, aristocratic, 
God-ocratic of all religions. It has therefore been the 
most intensely intolerant and bitter in persecuting. 
It is the Peter the Great in spirit. It only has the 
word of God. It is bound to defend at all costs what 
it believes to be God's revealed will. 

There is no possible form of Christianity, therefore, 
that we can dream of as the religion of the future ; but 
an increase of individualism. Nature is divine; it is 
full of God's voice. It is to a wiser, fuller interpreta- 
tion of nature that we look for help. It can help our 
bodies. It can heal our spirits. The holy oil that the 
Apostle bade them pour on the sick is not worth the 
smallest pellet of the most devoted 33rd dilutionist. 
The theology of Trinities and Heavens is of less value 
to heal the soul than one page of Huxley's Lay Ser- 
mons out of science. 

The religion of the future is necessarily based more 
and more on science because science is knowledge. It 
is the audiphone for the simple man's ear. God is 
always speaking; what we want is to enlarge our 
power of hearing. Theism cries, Hear. Revealed re- 
ligion cries, Read. Theism cries, Look up. Revealed 
religion cries, Look down. 

While we look ahead we^cannot look toward central- 
ization. Concentric motion of humanity builds the 
church, and the church requires commands and enforces 
concentric action. Men and minds must move in cir- 
cles to be Catholic and Orthodox. 



186 LIBERTY AND LIFE. % 

The movement of the future must be progressive. 
It will be Christianity in so far as Christianity has 
most of human nature in it. It will be Protestant in 
so far as Protestantism is an escape from the super- 
natural. It will be Christian and Protestant not one 
whit farther. 

I make no attempt to formulate the creed of the 
future. I only know that we are coming to an age 
when no church can burn, hang or shoot us for learn- 
ing, and to an age when no man will care a fig whether 
the priest damns him or not. 

I do not think men will care much about creeds. 
Each man will believe as he likes; and the last thing 
thought of will be to make him conform his beliefs to 
his neighbors. 

Yet I must venture to suggest that in this religion 
of the future we shall have a growing disregard for 
rewards and punishments, the future life will come to 
seem only a continuation of this one. The schedule of 
salvation will be entirely forgotten, while we strive 
only to live nobly and deserve. The church will have 
no divine voice for us. Books will have no revealed 
will. The soul will be the plain where God and your- 
self walk. The language there spoken will be the 
language of conscience — a language which both God 
and men speak. We shall learn that virtue leads to 
joy. Nay, we have always known it; but we have 
learned to hear more distinctly that joy depends on 
obedience to authority. The greatest authority on 
earth is the law that is written before birth on the 
soul. Jesus quoted it when he bade us "love God 
and love our neighbor." Better than the endorsement 
of ordinary Councils will be such an endorsement as 
this : • 

" He left a load of anthracite 

In front of a poor widow's -door, 
Where the deep snow, frozen and white, 
Wrapped street and square, mountain and moor. 



THE RELIGION OF THE FUTURE. 18*7 



That was his deed, 
He did it well. 

What was his creed? 
I cannot tell. 

He had great faith in loaves of bread 
For hungry people, young and old, 

And hope-inspiring words he said 
To those he sheltered from the cold. 

For man must feed 
As well as pray. 

What was his creed? 
I cannot say. 

In words he did not put his trust, 
In faith his words were never writ, 

He loved to share his cup and crust 
With any one who needed it. 

He took the lead 
In each good task. 

What was his creed? 
I did not ask. 

He put his trust in God, and worked 
Ever along with hand and head, 

And what he gave in charity 
Sweetened his sleep and daily bread. 

Let us take heed, 
Our lives amend, 

Adopt his creed, 
Nor fear the end." 



NEW YEAE IN 1982. 



I shall take the liberty this morning of transporting 
you one hundred years into the future. The journey 
will be so easy and brief as not to weary you. Indeed 
you are there now. It is 1982; January 1. If you 
look back to 1882 you will be surprised at the rapidity 
of human progress. 

We call this the age of enlightenment. The preced- 
ing was called the age of civilization. We have now 



188 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

only to anticipate one more age, that of pure reason, 
which will also be the era of unbroken peace. The 
characteristic of the previous age was steam. That 
we have quite outlived as fit only for those who do not 
care for speed or safety. The characteristic of our age 
is, above all, electricity. The changes wrought by this 
power since it has been thoroughly controllable have 
revolutionized human work and life and the very face 
of nature. 

It has not only taken the place of steam, but it is 
used in every department of life. We heat and we 
light our houses electrically. We use it in securing 
almost an equilibrium of health. It liberates ozone, 
destroys the germs of malaria, and, above all, has 
secured for us almost entire exemption from disease. 
It has been so applied as to abolish night when we 
will, thus fulfilling the old prophecy that in the new 
heavens and new earth there shall be no night. Dark 
roads, and dark city streets are of the past. Lovely 
gardens are never more lovely than under the electric 
arc. Illuminators of jets fixed upon knolls and hill- 
sides lighten whole valleys. Vegetation is quickened 
by it, and the sun every way supplemented as a life 
giver. 

The discovery of Faure's secondary batteries was 
made in 1881. Since that vastly better methods have 
been devised for storing electric power, so that we lit- 
erally box up Niagara and other localized force and 
carry it off under our arms to use where and when we 
will. 

Civilization was the blossom of barbarism ; enlighten- 
ment is the fruitage of civilization. Civilization endured 
from 1420 to 1750, that is, from printing to the steam 
engine ; semi-enlightenment to 1880, that is the period 
of applied electricity. From about that period our own 
age takes its rise. We have done more in this last 
century than was done in the preceding five ; although 



, NEW YEAR IN 1982, 1S9 

the century of semi-enlightenment was remarkable for 
rapidity of invention and for applied thought. 

It astounds us to look backward and study what our 
fathers mistook for social order and comfort. The so- 
ciety of that day was at best only a state of warfare. 
A few of the people, a small minority, were trying to 
keep the majority from stealing their accumulations 
and cutting their throats. Wars were almost con- 
stantly raging. Not less than three millions of men 
were under arms. By the records of daily news- 
papers it is evident that a city was one of the most 
enormous monstrosities that could have been de- 
vised. It was simply a necessity of a slow moving 
era. As a result of such life, thieves and murderers, 
and, generally speaking, the most useless and the most 
hurtful beings, were bred and fostered and multiplied. 
New York had no less than 50,000 who preyed on the 
rest as thieves, not counting its Ring thieves and pro- 
fessional reformers. Chicago with a population of 
500,000 had as many plunderers as New York. The 
poor were herded and never grew out of the herd in- 
stincts. 

And yet our ancestors were immensely proud of their 
cities and boasted of nothing so much as the number 
of population. Their dreams were always of vastly 
increased numbers. St. Louis spread itself in vision 
until it filled the vast valley of the Mississippi. Chi- 
cago was to number 4,000,000, and Toledo and Denver 
were equally desirous of being the "future great city" 
of the world. On a map a city looked like a huge 
devil fish, with its railroad tentacles seizing and hold- 
ing every section of the surrounding country. Enorm- 
ous growth was not all a dream. Cities actually over- 
lapped each other, the larger absorbing the smaller. 
New York in 1900 numbered 4,000,000, Chicago 
3,000,000. 

Rapid transit seemed to be the only relief. A good 



190 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

deal was done to disgorge cities of their crowds by 
means of elevated railways and subterraneous tunnels ; 
but still the houses kept adding story to story, and 
human beings were packed away like herrings. In 
1800 a four-story house was rare. In 1850 a six-story 
house was common. In 1880 there were vast tenement 
houses ten stories high, besides two stories beneath 
the soil. Here men became diseased and immoral 
wretches. In 1910 the degradation had gone so far 
that a great suicide mania broke out. In the larger 
cities not less than four millions rushed pell-mell out 
of life. The rivers were dammed with corpses. Whole 
families despaired. The poets of the populace sang 
the glory of death. The Nihilism of 1880 was noth- 
ing to it. For five years the authorities struggled in 
vain to stay the horrible self-slaughter. "Why live," 
cried the hopeless creatures. "We live only to slave; 
and not for ourselves." 

Electricity and aluminium, as you well know, have 
absolutely put an end, not only to the horror of city life, 
but to city life itself in the ancient sense. The capacity 
of steam and iron are so far surpassed that one hundred 
miles an hour is minimum speed, except for pleasure 
craft. Their applications are also by no means confined 
to costly and dangerous cars and boats. 

The reform in travel was hastened by an accident 
which might have been foreseen. An epizootic disease 
had frequently swept over the States, destroying thou- 
sands of horses and crippling travel to an alarming 
extent. But in 1899 this disease took a form vastly 
more fatal, and in two months left but a few score live 
horses in all the land. For a time commerce was par- 
alyzed. Business men were terrified. But, as it has 
always happened with the Yankee race, invention soon 
filled the gap and more than filled it, so that the horse 
is always referred to as the animal that so long hin- 
dered the progress of the human race. His departure 



NEW YEAR IN 1982. 19] 

has also tended more than any other thing to the elim- 
ination of that peculiar adjunct of civilization — the 
"horse-man." The horse was the only animal that 
ever had complete mastery over any number of human 
beings, making them his moral and physical inferiors, 
as you will see by reference to Dean Swift's "Gul- 
liver's Travels," or in the columns of every newspaper 
published in the nineteenth century. The only horses 
now in existence are the property of very fat people, 
who cannot navigate the air. In 1882 a congress was 
called of balloonists, the object being to discover some 
method of securely steering an air ship, This they 
fixed upon, but nothing came of it till, as I said, the 
horses were destroyed. It then occurred to an inhab- 
itant of the State of La Vega to try surrounding him- 
self with a balloon under his arms, which being sup- 
plied with small reservoirs containing the materials 
for generating gas, also with valves to allow its escape, 
enabled the wearer to rise and descend as he would. 
Thus harnessed, as you might say, he not only was 
able to travel easily in any direction, but to bear very 
heavy burdens, which were carried along by the elec- 
trical steering and propelling apparatus, assisted by 
the wind. In this way huge weights were lifted by a 
force of men and placed in any location desired. Men 
traveled in straight lines rather than by tortuous coun- 
try roads ; roads were largely given over to cultivation ; 
millions of lines of fence were made unnecessary, and 
that most terrible of all horrors, a drive in the mud of 
a country road, forever a thing of the past. Whoever 
now has marketing to do hitches himself up and 
alights with his basket at the door of some store, built 
not on the dusty street for the convenient access of 
horses, but in -the midst of a lovely garden or grove. 
What would our ancestors of the nineteenth century 
think to see us. without dust, without mud, without 
tedious delay, without lumbering noisy carts, dropping 



192 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

in upon a grocery in a grove of lindens, or a dry- 
goods store, half a mile from any other building, but 
full of business; clerks coming and going, and rising 
or alighting at will. 

Electricity has also been applied as you know to the 
hauling of immense weights on farms or elsewhere in 
cars something like the old steam road cars in vogue 
for macadamizing roads in 1890. Of course railroad 
monopolies are now no longer a danger. All men are 
independent of any Yanderbilts and Goulds who might 
arise. Yast trains of immense convoys move in 
every direction through the air to and from the greater 
marts. These electric cars are also capable of self- 
illumination, and are thus at night objects of great 
beauty, moving with colored lights, while they largely 
assist in illuminating the earth below. Postoffices are, 
except for central distribution, dispensed with for 
post convoys which drop the mail at each man's door. 

You will readily see that this easy and rapid transit 
must have had vast power in banding together States 
and spreading population more evenly. In 1950 we 
numbered ninety-four states, spreading from the Isth- 
mus northward to Alaska and Newfoundland, and 
counting in the West Indies as two. It was thought 
best to reject the request of the Sandwich Islands, 
as more properly belonging to the Pacific league of 
republics. 

The league of the nations was formed early in the 
century. It was the outgrowth of republicanism. 
Standing armies became an unendurable burden. It 
was found that sixty-eight xlmerican states could fra- 
ternize in government. Why should not the ten repub- 
lican states that then formed Europe and six more in 
Asia and nine in Africa, as well as a dozen more in the 
Pacific, form an international compact? This was done, 
and now peace is maintained as a mutual interest with 
no standing armies whatever. 



NEW YEAR IN 1982. 193 

An International Conference is in constant session 
at Cadiz, Spain ; with branches at Sydney, Australia, 
New York and Yeddo. This is a sort of court, with- 
out power to enact laws, but an arbiter between 
nations, whose decision is final. It is bound in its 
decisions by u The Constitution of United Humanity," 
which is the common law of the whole world. 

One peculiar pest of the experimental ages was an 
immense amount of legislation. Congresses, legislat- 
ures, supervisors were everywhere in session; piling 
up laws that no man ever found out until he broke 
them, and that were not repealed after they were dead. 
Indeed the same law was often passed three or four 
times over, so little did any one know what statutes 
really existed. 

All this we are now happily rid of. Congress meets 
but once in ten years, and no law is constitutional 
which cannot be written upon your thumb nail. Other 
legislative bodies meet but once in five years, except 
supervisors, who are allowed five days each year. Con- 
gress and the legislatures are not permitted to remain 
in session over one month. All time wasted in dead- 
locks and factional struggles is now charged to the 
f actionists at the rate of four times the pay they would 
receive if about the public business. 

In the dawn of science men expressed their wishes 
by congregating on certain days and casting ballots 
into a box. This was a vast waste of time and gave 
rise to infinite jargon. At last wise men were no longer 
allowed to advise or rule. The herd born in the ken- 
nels were voters. Women claimed by right the same 
privilege. It was impossible to deny the right. The 
crowds rushed from their employments and with hur- 
rahs proclaimed their freedom with scraps of paper. 
The real fact was that the whole thing came under the 
head of the doctrine of chances, and at last it was so 
demonstrated to the satisfaction of the people. In the 



194 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

first place nobody knew who the men were that he 
voted for. Second, nobody knew what these men would 
do if elected. Third, nobody knew how many lies he 
was believing about his neighbors' candidates. Fourth, 
nobody knew what influences were at work to make his 
voting useless. The chances were that most men would 
both make fools of themselves and be made fools of. 
When men finally saw this they invented automata, 
voting automata, that should by simply being wound 
up vote for twelve hours without stopping. Any can- 
didate was allowed to put into this machine 999 votes 
for himself. After all the candidates' names were in, 
the town beadle stirred the votes well up with six turns 
at the crank of equality, and the automaton, being wound 
up, began its work. When the sun went down the count 
was made, and the successful candidates' names photo- 
graphed on the electric town illuminator. People went 
on working and simply looked up to say: "Tom Jones 
is ten votes ahead. Long live Tom! He's a good fel- 
low." This system proved to be quite as satisfactory 
as the old in expressing the will of the people, while 
it absolutely headed off the bosses, who found it was 
wholly useless to shake hands with automata; and then 
it gave women an equal chance with men. The saving 
in people's time was two days a year for 25,000,000 of 
voters. This at $2 a day was just $100,000,000 saved 
each year. The country was just that much richer. 
At the same time the bummers were gradually elim- 
inated, having no political employment; stealing de- 
creased, and the national wealth was added to not less 
than $100,000,000 a vear more. Here was a saving 
of $200,000,000. 

In the age of civilization the press became the sov- 
ereign power. It was indeed too powerful, for becom- 
ing the instrument of monopolies it was for a time the 
enemy of freedom and the bold promulgator of lies. 
In the progress of events men considered that to keep 



NEW ^EAR IN 1982. 195 

up with the age they must have their news at least 
once a week. Then came the need of a daily paper. 
Then the system was perfected for placing a bulletin 
on each man's counter three times a day and Rye times 
on Sunday. Then the telephone was used wholly to 
dispense with the press. The chief editor of the United 
States sat in New York and directed the messages 
which simultaneously flashed once an hour to every 
village in the land. But even this system did not 
satisfy the needs of enlightenment. An hour to us 
seemed as long as six months to the Puritans of the 
seventeenth century. News must be instantaneous. 
Whatever occurred must be sent as by a nerve thrill 
through all the world. And so it is to-day that a sys- 
tem is perfected whereby all news is photographed 
automatically from post to post over the whole Union. 
All that a man has to do is to look at the town signal 
station where he can every ten minutes hear from the 
whole world. It is thought that a system is about 
complete whereby, by a combination of photophone 
and photograph, the world's news will be announced 
in clear tones at sunrise from every town electric sta- 
tion. People will then simply be awakened by a town 
alarm clock, will roll over in bed, and hear from Asia 
and Europe before dressing. What a change is this 
from the old Morning Herald days! It is a vast 
saving of eyes over the nonpareil and brevier of the 
newspaper. 

But most wonderful of all is the revelation of the 
cosmoscope, whereby we are actually in communication 
with the inhabitants of Jupiter's moons. We are rap- 
idly perfecting a system of common signals, which will 
enable us to see and hear as regularly from other sys- 
tems of worlds as from other planets. 

In no respect were our civilized ancestors more to be 
pitied than in the gloomy and unhealthy houses which 
they occupied. No material was known before 1883 



196 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

except wood, stone and brick. Now none of those are 
ever used. A stone house is but one stage ahead of a 
cave. A wooden house is poisonous beyond estimate, 
accumulating the germs of all the ancient but now 
eliminated fevers and plagues. So long as they were 
used small-pox and typhoid fever, lurking in the walls, 
were sure to be annual pests. The first introduction of 
blocks of glass marks an epoch. We have now the 
most beautiful and indestructible material, capable of 
every modification of color, and easily secured against 
any infection. No one will live over a cellar of filth, 
which can be seen through the floor. The marvelous 
relation of color to health can also be considered. The 
mother can have a blue room, the growing child a yel- 
low room, the old people a red room. In fact it is so 
decreed by law. Paper is used in building wherever 
temporary use only is required. Houses to rent may 
be built of this material, but for whatever purpose con- 
structed they must be burned up at the end of three 
years, so that no tenement house is ever a foul nest. 
This paper is a new discovery, of great strength, water 
proof, and very cheap. It is exceedingly valuable for 
portable purposes and storage. As no house is ever 
permitted to be over two stories in height, there is little 
danger from sudden conflagration. 

Not only are our houses made of glass, rendered 
opaque, but the furniture is also of glass; articles of 
ductile glass are worn; vessels of glass as elastic 
as rubber are in common use. The brittle glass of the 
civilized age is known only as a curiosity. Our homes 
in fact contain in their structure and furnishing almost 
nothing but glass and aluminium. For the past 65 years 
not a death has occurred from the burning of a dwelling 
house, school or theatre. In the nineteenth century 
not less than 5,000 w r ere thus burned up annually. 

Co-operative building associations are not our dis- 
covery, but we have so increased and perfected them 



NEW YEAR IN 1982. 197 

that no ♦industrious poor man fails to have his own 
home, free from mortgage or rent. Every house is 
surrounded by its garden, and so health and comfort 
are absolutely universal to those who have regard for 
their own well being. 

Eighty years ago saw the last of the popes; seventy- 
four years ago the last of the Sultans and Khedives; 
forty-two years ago Protestantism culminated in a law 
forbidding men to waste the public capital in buildings 
that did not contribute to the public welfare. The 
State, finding that the Church in 1840, owned forty 
millions of real estate, in 1860 sixty millions, in 1890 
two hundred millions, in 1920 nine hundred millions, 
and all of it untaxable, confiscated the whole of it in this 
way : that all this property should be assigned to purposes 
conducive to the. better education and comfort and the 
general ennoblement of the people. A portion was as- 
signed to doing the works of Jesus instead of preach- 
ing his words ; and a portion to education. Some of 
the larger and more convenient churches were trans- 
formed into public culture halls, used for all styles of 
teaching, by schools, by lectures, by homilies or ser- 
mons, and by healthful amusement. Others were used 
as caravansaries for poor travelers, who could there be 
served at cost with simple food, and alloted a bed for a 
pittance. Others still were used for hospitals. But 
the changes in building material, and in the general 
structure of cities, have led to the entire destruction 
of most of these structures, or their final use as mu- 
seums of antiquity. 

Not one divine right king, emperor, church or priest 
remains on earth. Theology has given way to anthro- 
pology. "The proper study of mankind is man." 
Gods are not now so much a matter of interest as man. 
We consider that if we treat our neighbor as we should, 
we satisfy that neighbor's divine protector. 

The prevailing religion of the world is Theistic as 



198 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

opposed to Materialism ; but as I said its corner stone 
is anthropology. It is almost universally held that 
God is the soul of the universe, that all things are 
the expression of primal life; that universal intelligence, 
and an undeniable moral tide in time, involve the idea 
of an omnipresent eternal soul or spirit. 

Once in five years an international religious confer- 
ence is held at Benares, or Jerusalem, or Paris, or 
Valparaiso, or Salt Lake City, to discuss the great 
problems of the soul. But no one has for seventy 
years ventured to present an essay on baptism, or hea- 
ven or hell, or any atonement scheme. The topics 
discussed pertain to the scientific solution of 
the questions that look to man's ennoblement. Im- 
mortality is a theme of great interest, as also our her- 
edity from God. No creed has ever been suggested in 
these assemblies. Any one who shall propose one 
hereafter will be condemned to walk in a treadmill and 
repeat his creed aloud for fifteen days. It is sup- 
posed that he will by that time become so sick of it 
that the world will hear the last of it forever. 

There are in some sense still Mohammedans, Jews, 
Christians, Buddhists, that is, men with hereditary 
bias to prefer certain teachings thus entitled. But the 
individualism of the day wholly overcomes all tendency 
to form sects or castes or cliques of any sort.. 

Our Reformed Theistic calendar gives us twenty- 
four holy days in a year. These days are in memory 
of the noblest products of the race. Among the men 
thus remembered are: Brahma, Buddha, Zoroaster, 
Confucius, Lao Tse, Socrates, Jesus, Mohammed, Savo- 
narola, Luther, Wilberforce, Washington, Franklin. 

Men are theistic rather by nature than by logic. To 
prove the existence of a God has been pronounced the 
idiocy of wisdom. If God cannot prove himself he 
cannot be; for self assertion is the first principle of 
selfhood. 



NEW YEAR IN 1982. 199 

''But when the moon shines crescent in the west, 

And the faint outline of the part obscured, 

Threadlike, curves visible from hour to hour; 

And Jupiter supreme among the orbs, 

And Mars with rutilating beam comes forth, 

And the great concave opens like a flower, 

Unfolding galaxies and firmaments 

Sparkling with separate stars, or snowy white 

With indistinguishable suns beyond, 

Men pause, and rest at their toil again, 

And look around, in adoration look, 

For gazing on the inconceivable 

They feel God is; though inconceivable." 

I must relate to you just here a prophecy uttered in 
1868 by one of the truest prophets of that century: 
Gerritt Smith, by name. He says: "I predict that in 
1918, 50 years from now, the inquiry in Hamilton Col- 
lege and other American colleges will be not what 
Balaam's ass says, but what nature says; not what the 
miraculous suspension of the laws of nature teaches, 
but what these never changing laws teach; not what 
was thought in the deep darkness of the superstitious 
past, but what does science reveal to the living present. 
Greatly in advance of our wisdom will be that of our 
more science-favored successors, and their religion, 
largely shaped by science, will be far in advance of 
ours, which is still debased by superstition. Christen- 
dom will at no distant day ring with the cry: " Down 
with superstition,' up with science." Of course such a 
prophet was hated, and his prophecy, as far as possible, 
suppressed ; but it has been more than fulfilled. 

The last Calvinist died over fifty years ago. A monu- 
ment was erected over his bones with these simple and 
truthful w r ords: "Here Calvinism lies." 

Colleges that were one hundred years ago appealing 
to the public for money in the name of Calvin, Armin- 
ius, and general sectarian interests, were one after 
another converted by a lack of scholars and a plethora 
of debts, to make their appeals on the score that they 
could and would give young people the very best ad- 



200 • LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

vantages for broad culture and fine characters. Cornell 
and Harvard, and Johns Hopkins Universities, as 
measurably a few more, learned the key of success in 
the previous century. The National University at 
Washington has now its branches in every State ; and 
no college is alive, that has not enrolled itself under 
the general national system. It was, however, neces- 
sary to enact and enforce a law against college financial 
agents and solicitors. 

Any college caught begging after it was twenty-one 
years old was deprived of its charter. In this way 
we are happily rid of a vast number of such institutions 
which were really only the infant departments to theo- 
logical seminaries. A few of them remain, but are 
designated as Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian 
Kindergartens. They pursue the same curriculum 
as of old, teaching the nursery tales told 5,000 years 
ago by Hebrew balladists and novelists. 

A good deal of honor must be granted to our ances- 
tors of the civilized period for having some sort of 
notions of universal and compulsory education. Their 
plans were, however, astoundingly crude in many ways. 

(1.) They separated intellectual from moral educa- 
tion, giving the latter over to Sunday-school teachers, 
mainly a breed of limp goody-wouldies who didn't 
exactly know what to do or how to do it — and who for 
the most part "occupied the time;" telling yarns about 
Gods, hells, heavens and supernatural nonsense, not 
knowing anything about natural things. The schools 
of enlightenment now educate every faculty and power 
of the boy or girl, and so we get well rounded charac- 
ters for citizens. ( 2. ) In those days they paid vast at- 
tention to the books used, in which the teachers were 
first examined. These books were annually selected by 
a board of politicians under the advice of book agents. 
Now we first of all require that the teacher shall un- 
derstand his pupils, and use just what means he finds 



NEW YEAE IN 1982. 201 

best to bring each one to his best use. We no longer 
educate by platoons, but consider each child a distinct 
and unique individual to be wrought upon unlike all 
others. (3.) They only required children to go to 
school and that for only a few of their growing years. 
We require all persons to go to school through life, 
learning whatever is adapted to their years. 

We are also very particular to make the schools for 
those not fully grown adapted to the development of 
bodies as well as minds. We recognize above all 
things that bodies and minds are one, and must be 
taken together. For the first twenty years no child is 
allowed to study with the brain more than one consec-. 
utive hour. Play is called body study, and is as care- 
fully taught as any other science. So body study al- 
ternates hourly with brain study. Every school in- 
cludes drill in mechanics and arts as well as in studies 
for the memory. 

History that is used in these years is mainly con- 
temporary, and all children are brought into relation — 
not with the old brute ages — the wars, and kings, and 
tyrants, and beastly generations, when men were only 
half evolved, but they are made to know the ripest 
social and civil life of the present period. All ar^ 
taught to look forward rather than backward. 

But in no respect has our school method advanced 
more than in this, that it is compulsory, not only as 
regards books, but as regards work. Every child is 
prepared by the State for self-support, and to add to 
the State w r ealth. The system in vogue in 1882 cre- 
ated a large proportion of paupers, especially of the 
girls. They were taught enough to raise them above 
work. Now w r e teach them that no one can be so 
despicable as one who does not know how to do any- 
thing well. And as education is a life work, every 
artisan is enabled to keep pace with all improved 
methods in his trade. So you see we have nearly 



202 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

educated the pauperism out that civilization educated 
in. Every man and woman has a business that can be 
followed if necessary. 

Thus the State, once absorbed by the Church, has 
essentially absorbed the Church ; and is responsible to 
all citizens for their best possible individual^ physical, 
intellectual, and moral development. 

In no one thing has the age progressed more rap- 
idly than in abbreviated book making. It was found 
by a commission appointed in 1934 for this purpose, 
that by careful pruning, any book in the English lan- 
guage could be compressed one-half without detriment 
to the sense. The bulk of general literature could be 
reduced four-fifths, without losing an idea. Timothy 
Titcomb went down from 2,800 to just 63 pages. 
Ruskin fell off to three thin volumes. Longfellow, 
Lowell and Whittier lost some pages, and a vast 
amount of books, not less than one-third in the cata- 
logue, absolutely evaporated. The magazines were 
then deprived of stuffing, and came down two- thirds, 
and occasionally nothing was left but a title-page. 
Newspapers were absolutely incomputable until twenty 
or thirty were taken together; and sermons were only 
considered by the barrel. When _ well established lies 
were eliminated from history, Macaulay looked as if 
worms had eaten his pages for years; and the Bible 
history was mostly blank. 

The result was that by international ordinance no 
book is now permitted to be published that is not first 
cut down one-half from the author's first version, and 
then one-half again. If the author refuses to do the 
clipping himself the public commissioner simply tears 
out every other page, a process which it is found rarely 
injures the sense of the volume. 

Sermons, lectures, addresses, commencement ora- 
tions, platform poems, etc., are now condensed into 
small phonographs, and are distribute I to the audience 



NEW YEAR IN 1982. 203 

to be filled out at home. General rules are published, 
like an old-fashioned grammar, showing about what 
proportion of words should be stirred into a condensed 
sermon to make it sufficiently thin for an ordinary 
mind. A sermon with one idea needs 5,000 words; 
one with ten ideas needs but 1,000 words; while one 
with fifty ideas, which is the extreme of quality, needs 
but 500 words — the more ideas, invariably the fewer 
words. It was found most difficult to provide for those 
that did not contain any ideas at all. 

Evolution in 1882 was looked upon as only a matter 
of the past. It was not dreamed of as a principle of 
practical application to develop higher aims in the 
future. Men were busy hunting up their ancestors. We 
have long since learned that the larger application of 
evolution is to secure noble descendants. The average of 
human life is already increased to sixty-three, and old 
age begins at about eighty-five. It is computed that one 
man out of every two hundred reaches the age of one 
hundred and twenty-five ; one out of each one thousand 
and thirty attains to one hundred and fifty years, and 
seventy well authenticated cases are on record of the 
ripe age of from one hundred and seventy-five to two 
hundred and twenty -five. It is now thought by scien- 
tists that human life may be extended to 350 or 360 
years and the vital average raised to nearly 100. 

But what would our ancestors of the offclearing age 
think of our Heredity Islands? In 1928 it was 
agreed at the council of the nations to set apart the 
Bermudas, Madagascar and New Zealand for a nursery 
of humanity ; to raise, if possible, a select and vastly 
superior stock, that should itself become the parent of 
a grand future human family. To these islands were 
sent infants selected from all the world as the most 
absolutely perfect in brain, body and beauty; and 
already we have the results of scientific selection and 
breeding in a race of Shakespeares, Bacons and Pla- 



204 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

tos, with bodies like Apollo, and souls like the beauti- 
ful Buddha and gracious Brahma. Less than sixty years 
have brought us to the children of the third genera- 
tion, and the product is as gods sprung from men. We 
have already sufficient of these children of science to 
furnish us with governors and international counselors. 
In a few generations more they will overrun the earth 
and redeem the nations,, 

Evolution has, however, not been overlooked as a 
theory explaining the origin of man and linking all 
th£ processes of nature into one complete unity. The 
missing .links have been so frequently found that no 
one even doubts the truth of the scientific explanation 
of species and genus, and especially of the genus homo. 
Bat very strangely the truth of the evolution theory 
became confirmed quite as stoutly by the lapsing of 
man toward the animal. Tribes were found that were 
rapidly retrograding in physical as well as mental 
characteristics toward the ancestral anthropoid types. 
Other animals are evidently in certain cases lapsing or 
retrograding toward more primitive organizations. 

A very peculiar feature of the morals of the infant 
ages was the effort to be good by being stupid. Chil- 
dren were forbidden to read novels and confined to 
Sunday-school books, till one morning the people 
waked up to find that every Sunday-school book that 
had been written for sixty years, was itself a novel, 
and of the poorest sort at that, and that all of these 
children had read them, and had read nothing else, 
and so had moral natures of a skim milk sort. The 
cream was all in the forbidden books. The result was 
that the children were now forbidden to bring a Sun- 
day-school book into the houses, but ordered hereafter 
to use their judgment in selecting from all books what 
was best. Their judgments would have been better 
if not so long perverted. Now as a matter of fact the 
novel is considered one of the grandest educators in 



NEW YEAR IN 1982. 205 

the world. The greatest thinkers, from Ruth and Job 
and Goethe and Richter and Fritz Renter and Auer- 
bach have used the novel to convey the sublimest 
truth. 

In the civilized age woman was either a menial or a 
goddess — rarely an equal. Her rights were grudg- 
ingly granted, and in some respects she was never 
allowed equality with man. Our age has not only cor- 
rected this, but in some degree revised it. Woman, 
being recognized as a natural savior, is now not only in 
supreme control of the household, but she constitutes 
one branch of the legislature, with sole power to orig- 
inate laws pertaining to employment, sumptuary mat- 
ters, and those regulating or punishing social evils. 
She is also permitted to seek her life partner with the 
same frankness once reserved wholly to the male sex. 
The nonsense of a breach of promise suit is now a thing 
of the past, and since divorced persons w r ere set to labor 
on public works, there is not an average of twenty-five 
divorces a year on this continent. 

But the change has not been altogether in one direc- 
tion. It was found that equality of the sexes required 
that something be granted to the male sex as well as 
to the female. Among other things women no longer 
do the shopping, a change which many of them con- 
sider more than an offset to all acquired privileges. 
But then it is estimated that one hundred and sixty 
millions of years are saved each year in the handling 
of goods ; and the saving in wear and tear and clerk 
hire is not less than five hundred millions a year. 

The reform in civil service was foretokened at the 
close of the previous era. Our century opened with 
the struggle to get rid of an incubus' of office- holders 
and office -seekers that bid fair to "subvert republican 
government. It is enough to say that order has come 
out triumphant. Any person who now seeks an office 
is at once placed on trial, and unless he can prove the 



206 LIBERTY AND LIFE. 

incumbent of that office to be incompetent or malfeas- 
ant he is transferred to the public works for one year. 
When we get a good servant we do not discharge him 
simply for sake of a change. 

Another and most remarkable social change that 
belongs to this century is the utilization of vagabond- 
age. The amount of power that was wasted by our 
ancestors was simply enormous. Counting tramps, 
thieves, revivalists, traveling doctors, bar-room loafers, 
politicians, and the unemployed generally, it has been 
estimated that two-fifths of the human male power 
went to waste, and one-fifth of the female. It is now 
twenty-four years since every man must have some 
reasonable occupation, contributing his one man power 
to the community voluntarily; or he must do it by 
force. The vast system of irrigation which now covers 
the continent and renders a drought practically impos- 
sible; the charging of the secondary batteries which 
give the power for lighting the continent; and for so 
far moderating the climate that in the State of Toronto 
or Alaska the mercury never marks more than five be- 
low zero; the construction of all public buildings, as 
well as much more for the public benefit, is performed 
by those who formerly preyed on society. Among 
these are classified criminals of, all sorts, beggars of 
every grade, saloonkeepers, professional jurymen, of- 
fice seekers who fail to pass the civil service examina- 
tion, all public speakers who fail to give one fresh idea 
in an hour, all who by threats of future punishment 
induce people to believe or do what is unreasonable, 
indeed all who cannot show that they have some ade- 
quate means of support not detrimental to their fellow- 
beings. 

Prisons and poorhouses are wholly abolished. The 
highest honor in the state is to take care of the help- 
less and sick. Since the decadence of theology prac- 
tical religion has grown in esteem. Criminals and 



NEW YEAR IN 1982. 207 

vagabonds are all at work. All punishment is reforma- 
tory. Those three times arrested are made to connect 
the wires of the powerful batteries used for public 
illuminating purposes, and are thus instantaneously 
killed. After two trials in the enlightened system, if 
reformation does not follow, the case is considered in- 
corrigible and the effort ended. Crime-haunts, such as 
abounded in the previous age, are almost an impossi- 
bility in these days. Criminals once convicted are 
called children of the state. They are secluded at 
their public employment, and, if reformed, are never 
allowed to propagate their species. The necessity of 
crime is thus rapidly being eliminated. 

The terrible contest of capital and labor that con- 
stantly threatened society in former ages has been 
mollified in many ways so as to be practically no 
longer dangerous. Our system of education, as already 
explained, has largely contributed to this, as also the 
downfall of priestcraft, but the two moral principles 
of co-operation and arbitration are so nearly univer- 
sally in use that they have to be credited with still 
greater power in mollifying social friction. We do not 
know the word servant any more than slave. All per- 
sons without permanent homes are registered; all 
needing additional help are also registered. The hired 
are adopted for one year or three, and have certain 
privileges as members of the household for that time. 
But as every man is an educated farmer or artisan, and 
eyeij woman an educated householder, cook or trades- 
woman, there is an easy equality never realized by our 
forefathers. Besides, unskilled help, you see, is now 
an impossibility. Every one is educated to know and 
to do. Every child is an apprentice to the state to 
learn accurately the best about something. We thus 
escape the fraud of help that needs more help than it 
can render. Mothers with babes do not educate igno- 
rant blockheads; the state does it. Nor do we have to 



208 



LIBERTY AND LIFE. 



pay for services we do not get. If any one is com- 
plained of as ignorant, he is at once compelled to go 
to school more hours, and if lazy is transferred to the 
public works. 

Speaking of the age of civilization I omitted to men- 
tion one thing which I now recall. Men would then 
sit and endure a sermon one hour in length, while to- 
day any enlightened speaker, it is considered, ought to 
condense far more good sense into ten minutes. The 
time thus saved it has been voted by the general con- 
ference of Theists shall be applied to the study of 
social science, while the time used in public prayer 
shall be used for trying to do some few of the things 
that men requested the Infinite to do, although the 
larger part of such desires have been voted inimical 
to the public welfare. This audience, I am sorry to 
say, belongs in the above respect to the old era. 

My good friends, I may have taken you too far from 
home and kept you here too long, but I like the shape 
of things so much better as they are than as they were, 
and I feel so proud of so long a pastorate, that I shall 
bid you good morning where we are. 



THE END. 



